No audit is complete without looking at your competitors! Let’s fill the rest of the worksheet by seeing how your competition’s social media is doing.
1. Bring your Social Media Audit Worksheet back up.
Open up the spreadsheet you used to do your own social media audit.
2. Open the sheet entitled ‘Competitive Analysis.’
Hit the competitive analysis tab, where you’ll find data fields to input about your competitors.
3. Choose a few competitors that are most similar to your business, then repeat the audit steps for their social media pages.
Only a handful of your closest competitors will do for the audit – maybe 5 maximum. Do pick the ones that have the most similar offerings to your brand. Once you’ve chosen those, go through the exact same steps found in the audit process above for each competitor.
4. You don’t need to review every one of their social media pages but look at the ones your business is running.
Not every competitor will be running the same social media pages as you – they may have more or fewer channels. You don’t need to do a complete audit of all their social media. Cover the ones that your business is using.
5. This bit of the spreadsheet doesn’t contain a ‘Performance/Value’ section.
Because you won’t have access to your competitor’s Google Analytics data, you can’t input any data about their performance.
6. Review your competitor’s most popular content on the ‘Activity/Content’ area.
The final part of the competitor analysis is to discover what content is finding a noticeable engagement. This can help shape future posts for your brand to grab attention. BuzzSumo is one of the best tools to accomplish this investigation, carried out as below:
- Head to BuzzSumo.com to analyze. The platform has limited features without a subscription, but this article only uses the free functionality.
- Paste your competitor’s URL in the search bar.
- Check the column that contains content with the social media channel you’re currently working on. Choose the one that has the most shares/engagement.