There is a saying in the English language: keeping up with the Joneses. This means striving to keep the same high living standard as your neighbours and not lagging behind with the fashion sense. It’s the soft definition of snobbery, but there is one positive note which transferred from people’s lives to business practices. It is the practice of keeping an eye on the competitors, and doing better than them in terms of customer care, shopping experience and marketing campaigns.
This is a good thing for everyone involved: for the customers, who enjoy better products and services; and for businesses, which become more professional and more profitable. So, how do you keep up with the Joneses in the business sense? The best place to do that is on the social media. And today we will show you how to do it with the help of online tools which make your work easier, simpler and less time consuming.
1. Fanpage Karma
This is the all-in-one tool to monitor your own page and your competitors on every notable social media platform: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram. The comprehensive dashboard allows you to add as many pages as you want with full analytics details on them, from weekly growth rate to engagement, post interaction and ad value.
The benchmarking function allows you to compare your Facebook page against as many competitors’ pages as you want, while the monitor function delivers reports every morning on the activity of competitor accounts you set. The business pricing plan, including all these features, is 238 AUD per month. If you are interested in analysing competition only on Facebook, you can choose the Pro plan, priced at 80 AUD per month.
2. Twitonomy
If your social media platform of choice is Twitter, then Twitonomy is the best analytics tool for you. With Twitonomy, you can monitor specific accounts in terms of analytics for each tweet, hashtag and mention, find out everything about people you follow or who follow you, monitor your favourite users’ tweets and track clicks on the links you posted on Twitter.
This service is available as a free plan, or a premium account with affordable pricing: 30 AUD per month or 290 AUD per year.
3. LikeAlyzer
Getting back to Facebook, LikeAlyzer is a free tool helping you get insights on any page. It does not provide side by side comparison with your own page, but you cannot expect a free service to do all the work for you.
LikeAlyzer provides information on: growth rate, post performance per type of post, comparison with average pages in the same category and in the same niche. It points out both the strong and weak points of the page, and even offers a list of links containing helpful advice for improving page performance (quite useful when you are analysing your own page).
4. Simply Measured
This is quite a high-end tool if you want to go for the full feature paid plan (the basic plan is 730 AUD), but it offers a lot of free features which give you a good idea of what your competitors are doing and how well your social media accounts perform compared to them. You can analyse profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Vine (Simply Measured is one of the first social media analysis tools to include this platform), plus find out how your social media activity influences traffic on your website.
5. Klear
Klear is available both as a free tool and as a premium service (priced at 365 AUD per month). The free tool allows you to analyse Facebook pages, Instagram and Twitter accounts, find influencers by skill or location, and download a PDF report about the presence of your business in the social media.
The premium service offers side-by-side brand monitoring against your top competitors in terms of brand awareness, activity, popularity and communication on the social media, and an in-depth analysis of your competition.
There you have it: from feature-laden, premium-priced tools to free tools, you have a lot of options to choose from in terms of competitor analysis on the social media, so you can always stay ahead of the game.