How to Use Social Data to Benchmark Against Your Competition

As I’ve made clear in my blog posts and other various writing endeavors, social data isn’t just about vanity metrics. Social data gives you key insights in to myriad parts of your business that extend all the way to the top of the business value chain: strategy. In this four part series, I’ll talk about what a complete social analytics for business strategy program in an ideal world looks like. This can and should be implemented across any company, in any industry. Unlike my other blog posts, I plan to get in to specific examples based on my past work to give you an idea on how to implement these concepts yourself. Here’s what I’ll be covering:

Part 1 begins with keeping tabs of your competition’s content and marketing strategy

Part 2 will cover using social listening as a tool to monitor brand value and the competition

Part 3 will delve in to details about how to use your own social data to drive business value

Part 4 will go in to more details around audience segmentation and marketing research

Competitive content marketing and strategy

Don’t roll your eyes at me, but the cliched term “content is king” is more important now than ever. Obviously for media and publishing companies, content really is king because it’s what brings in the bacon (on the backs of advertisers and sponsorships, of course). But everyone these days is getting in on the content game, and for good reason: marketers generally know that their target buyers see content as “value” and ads as “annoying.” (Yes, I’m overgeneralizing here as there are great ads but for the purpose of getting my point across please play along).

So what does social data have to do with a content strategy? These days, you’d be hard pressed to find a company that isn’t posting their “content” (whether that’s straight up ads, photos, videos, or articles) on social media. And thanks to competitive social analytics tools like Shareablee and SocialBakers, you now have a first row seat in to what your competition is posting across all social media channels, what’s resonating with their audiences, and what’s missing the mark.

Implementing a competitive social content and marketing program

So now you’ve decided that it’s worth tracking competitive content performance. Great! Where to start? The best place is benchmarking against your competition.

Effective social benchmarking requires an understanding of what success looks like on each channel. Because most social channels don’t provide competitive impression data, you’re reliant on engagements as a success metric. However, simply tallying up engagements and calling them a KPI is the wrong way to go. Instead, I recommend using ratios such as engagements per post or shares/comments as a percentage of total engagements. These ratios more accurately reflect how well content actually resonates with audiences.

Now that you’ve set up your KPI’s and your competitor list, the next step is to look for outliers in KPI performance on the post level. Paying attention to posts that significantly overindexed in shares and comments, or garnered significant video views (and the appropriate increase in engagements to rule out the effect of paid media) should be brought to the attention of the social media, content creation and marketing teams. The same thing can go for posts that significantly underperform as well. Paying attention to these performance outliers should happen on both a daily basis to help understand more tactical content performance, and on a quarterly basis to understand what the competition is doing strategically.

After you’ve set up your benchmarking and begin reporting on performance outliers, it’s time to ask the million dollar question: what are our short-term strategic content priorities? Perhaps there’s a push towards creating more social video, or a mandate to understand what articles are resonating the most in particular content categories such as, say, breaking news. Once you’ve figured out what these priorities, it’s time to get to work on a content deep dive. At BET, I worked on a number of these competitive deep dives to figure out what kind of content we should invest in creating. One instance involved understanding what beauty, health and lifestyle content was resonating on other sites, and using this information to arm the editorial team with insights as to what would most likely be effective for our own content.

So there you have it — a guide to competitive social data to inform and influence content decision making. It all comes down to benchmarking, outliers, and deep dives!

One final note: those of you in the know here might be rolling your eyes at me again (seems to be a theme here) and will say “yes Jon, companies are posting on social, but that whole Facebook algorithm change thingy means that they’re paying to reach users.” This is definitely true, but fortunately it’s hard to pay for Shares and Comments as those social engagements are much more valuable than simple likes. And companies like Shareablee have introduced paid and promotional detection to help do this work for you. Also, if a post does appear to be paid, this is a great insight as well, as content that is paid for is clearly of high value for your competition.

Next up: competition part 2 — using social listening to benchmark brand performance.