Speaker 1: What if you could find out exactly how your competitors grew to 1 million followers? What if you could see exactly who they're targeting so you can target them better? What if you could predict what posts would perform the best? Guess what? You can do all that. Let's run a social media competitor analysis together. Hey, I'm Eileen from HootSuite's social media team, and this is HootSuite Labs, where we teach you the science of social media marketing, how it works, and how to be successful. So what is a social media competitor analysis? It's not as sneaky as it sounds, but it is the best way to grow your accounts and get valuable information. The best part? There are only three steps. Keep watching because I'm going to show you how to automate each one and also show you how to get real-time competitive benchmarking that shows you how you're performing against your competitors at a glance. So grab the free template, open up Google Sheets, smash subscribe, and let's get into it. Step 1. Identify your competitors. Before we can spy on the competition, we have to know who they are, right? There are three ways to do this. Method 1. Start with the obvious ones. You probably know your main competitors, Coke vs. Pepsi, Nike vs. Adidas, Netflix vs. Sleep. You've got big rivals. Go ahead and write them down. But what about those sneaky competitors, the ones who aren't necessarily a threat in the balance sheets but are a threat in the streets of social media? I'm talking about the difference between direct and indirect competitors. Actually, maybe an example will help. Say you're Apple. Windows is one of your direct competitors. They make the same thing you do and target roughly the same audience. But what about indirect competitors? For instance, a company that makes chargers and cables that compete with Apple's own accessory But they don't make computers, Apple's core product. To find those indirect competitors, you need Method 2. Keyword Research. You probably already know your main keywords and hashtags. Let's search those on social platforms and see who comes up. For example, if I type investing into TikTok search, I get lots of suggestions and more targeted keywords like investing in real estate, investing tips, investing in your 20s, and more. I can ignore the topics that don't matter to my audience. But I do want to dig deeper on the ones that do matter and find out who's posting. There are probably at least a few accounts where it's telling something to my audience too. Some platforms even have built-in discovery features to show you related accounts. For example, on Instagram, tap the similar accounts button, the little present icon with the plus sign. On your own or a direct competitor's profile. And voila, more competitors. If you're finding this research eye-opening but time-consuming, here's a shortcut. The third, easiest method for identifying your social media competitors is using Hootsuite Streams. You can snoop on keywords right from Hootsuite by setting up streams to monitor keywords or accounts in real time. I'll cover how to use Hootsuite to monitor your competitors in more detail in a little bit so go ahead and grab your free 60-day Hootsuite trial. And add a few keywords to your search streams. Go to streams, then choose a board or add a new one and click add streams at the top. Pick the platform you want and choose the keyword or search option. The options are different for some platforms like Instagram which has a hashtag search instead. I've heard rumors that LinkedIn is working on an API for social listing so that will be a possibility soon. Type in your search term or hashtag and now you have a live feed of content right inside Hootsuite. You can pretty much create an infinite number of these to track whatever topics and competitors matters most. Step 2. Get to know your competitors. Like really, really know them. Open up that free social media competitor analysis template from the link below. Let's fill out the top section with your own information including current follower count, engagement rate, and all those other metrics we care about. Then do the same for each competitor. Add up to 5 of your top competitors and fill out as much of the spreadsheet as you can for each one. Okay, I know going into each social platform individually to get all those numbers can be kind of a pain. In contrast though, my colleague Deepa covers how to gather, measure, and record your analytics in her daily analytics routine video right here. Step 3. It's time to engage swap mode. We're getting into strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Strengths and weaknesses are internal, things your brand is doing great or could improve. Some of us are perfect and don't have any weaknesses at all. But yeah, okay, fine. Even I have weaknesses. That's okay though. This is the time to note them so you can eliminate them. Weaknesses and threats are external, like tactics your competitors are using that you want to incorporate into your own strategy or competitive threats you need to be aware of. And don't just look at how many followers your competitors have. Go through post by post to see which posts get the most engagement or if there's anything they're doing you want to add to your strategy. And do way better, of course. Maybe like the way they've organized their Instagram story highlights or how they cross post their TikToks or YouTube shorts or add the initials of the team members who applied on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Write down these observations in the SWOT analysis tab of the spreadsheet. What you do next depends on what you find. Maybe you make a report to bring to the rest of your team advising them of the threats. Or you make use of the weaknesses and opportunities when it comes time to renew next year's social media strategy. Watch Kyleena's video next if you want to learn more. Time for that bonus step I promised. Real-time competitor monitoring. So far we've been doing a one-time audit, which you could theoretically repeat annually or quarterly. But if you want to take it to the next level and save yourself the work, it's time to pull it all together with real-time competitor monitoring. I'm going to show you how to stay ahead of the game using Hootsuite. So if you don't already have a Hootsuite account, now's your chance to sign up for a free 60-day trial. With Hootsuite Analytics' powerful benchmarking and competitive analysis tools, you can see things like the most popular hashtags your competitors use, post performance, estimated engagement, how long their posts are, post likes or comments, follower growth, engagement rates, post frequency, and so much more at a glance. Here's how to add a competitor in Hootsuite Analytics. Go to Analytics, then Competitor Analysis under Benchmarking. At the top, I'll ask you to add a competitor, or say Manage Competitors if you already have one. Add your competitor's Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, or X, account and Hootsuite will start tracking detailed metrics for them and delivers super useful advice for you to improve. Like, maybe your competitors are posting way more reels than you, and they account for 95% of their engagement, so Hootsuite will tell you to step it up and focus more on reels too. You can compare your top-performing posts to theirs. Notice any similarities, patterns, key differences? This is all juicy info that can inform your social strategy. Plus, there are even more advanced tools available in Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch. Get real-time sentiment analysis, deep social listing across millions of resources around the web, reputation monitoring, and so much more. Watch my video on the best social media monitoring tools next if you want to learn more. Phew. Okay, that was a lot. I made you this super simple cheat sheet to keep your competitive analysis on track. Get ready to screenshot. Here's how to run a social media competitor analysis in 4 steps. Step 1. Identify your competitors. Start with the obvious ones, then do keyword research using Hootsuite. Step 2. Launch your investigation. Check everything in your free template. Step 3. Conduct a SWOT analysis. Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses, track your competitors' opportunities and threats. Step 4. Keep monitoring in real-time. Use Hootsuite to benchmark to stay on top of your competition. And congrats, you're a business spy now. Next it's time to put all that info into work. Karolina's social media strategy update video is coming up next. So bye for now.