There are several reasons why Twitter is a valuable tool for any marketer. For one, it’s an easy way to share and get information.
Marketers are always looking for what’s happening in their niche, and Twitter is an easy way to keep tabs on things. In many ways, Twitter is like a digital business card. Brands get to share quick product updates, new launches, and company information succinctly.
Twitter has almost 450 million monthly active users. This means businesses can reach large audiences on this platform. But to cultivate a community of brand advocates, you must devise a powerful strategy. This starts by monitoring your competitors.
In this blog, we’ll look at how you can do a Twitter competitor analysis in 5 simple steps.
But first, let’s have a look at what we mean by competitor analysis on Twitter.
What is a Twitter competitor analysis?
Twitter competitor analysis is when brands dissect their competitors’ performance on Twitter. Marketers can observe a competitor’s tweets and their moves on the platform to get rich insights.
Based on the reports you get from the analysis, you can create an action plan that helps your brand outperform the competition. Some of the key metrics you can observe while carrying out the analysis are:
- Number of daily tweets
- Total followers
- Growth rate
- Engagement rate (likes, replies, retweets, quoted tweets, and shares)
- Impressions
These details will help you understand where your brand stands on social media and the measures you need to take to improve your performance.
5 Benefits of tracking and analyzing your competitors on Twitter
Here are a few of the benefits you can get from carrying out a comprehensive Twitter competitor analysis:
1. Identify successful and upcoming competitors
When conducting a competitor analysis, you can identify who is performing well on that platform. Additionally, it also opens your eyes to not only the successful competitors but also the upcoming players.
2. Set performance benchmarks
You can set your performance benchmarks by doing a social media competitor analysis. This is because you and your competitors will have an overlap in audience demographics.
For example, check the performance of your recent tweets. If it is higher than your competitor’s, you can conclude your social media efforts are meeting and exceeding the desired results.
If your competitor is doing better, you need to re-evaluate your social media marketing strategies. Rework weak areas based on the findings.
3. Opportunities to pursue
Rarely will a competitor share all their secrets.
But by looking into their strategies and analyzing the results, you can better understand what is working for your competitor.
You can also better gauge their limitations and act upon them since they are opportunities for your brand to shine. It can be helpful in even estimating what is going wrong with past and current campaigns.
This gives you an opportunity to tweak your Twitter marketing and strategy and devise one that works for your target audience.
For example, Uber actively replies to mentions of them. They are on it whether it is a customer complaint or a casual mention. So, make audience engagement, trending, and informative content a part of your strategy.
4. A baseline for Twitter marketing strategy
Checking your competitor’s ongoing social media strategy is the best use of a Twitter competitor analysis. Are they tweeting 3 times a day? Do they reply to followers on the same day? Are they posting weekly threads? Have they experimented with different content lengths? How often do they run campaigns on Twitter?
Once you know the answers to such questions, you can try to replicate them in your Twitter marketing strategy. Next, A/B test to see if it is working for you.
If not, you can always tweak it further to see if you see success on the platform.
5. Cost-effective
It is possible that companies don’t have time to carry out a competitor analysis for each platform, or they are short on resources to do it themselves. They may even try to do it manually, but it only wastes more time and crucial resources.
This leads to them hiring expensive agencies for a task that can be done in-house with a competitor analysis tool.
By opting for a cost-effective tool like Keyhole, you can process huge chunks of competitor data almost immediately. What’s more, you even get insightful reports that can drive your Twitter marketing strategy toward the path of success.
How to do a Twitter competitor analysis in 5 simple steps
Follow these simple steps to get started on your Twitter competitor analysis:
Step 1: Identify competitors
The first step in any analysis is exploring the field’s competitors. To determine where your competitors are, you can start by listing the known industry players.
Apart from this, try doing a simple Google search for keywords related to your business. From there, you may find a few more for your analysis. You can even search for hashtags or keywords on Twitter to see which competitor shows up.
This exercise aims to identify which of your competitors is active on the platform. Narrow down up to 5 for your Twitter competitor analysis.
Step 2: Track basic metrics
Once you have a list of your competitors, you can track key metrics. It’ll help you assess how your account performs compared to your other accounts. Some of the metrics you can track are:
- Top tweets
- Growth in followers
- Top mentions
- Impressions
- Engagement rate
- Engagement (likes, retweets, quote tweets, replies, video views)
- Link clicks
- Profile views
You can view these insights for your account on the platform itself. But, for a more detailed Twitter competitor analysis, opting for third-party social media analytics tools is wise.
Step 3: Examine their audience
Once you analyze the basics, it’s also important to go more in-depth with your Twitter competitor analysis. Find out what demographics make up your competitors’ follower base.
Are they getting tons of engagement with a particular audience group? Is there an audience segment you’ve failed to target through your Twitter marketing efforts? Analyzing your competitors’ Twitter audience can give you the answer to these important questions.
Step 4: Check their content
It’s important to get a sense of your competitor’s tweeting habits in terms of volume and frequency. But it’s just as crucial to take a closer look at the type of content they’re putting out there.
Some questions you could ask yourself are:
- Do they exclusively post text-based tweets?
- Do they upload media, i.e., photo and video content?
- Do they retweet or quote tweets from followers and other brands often?
- Is their focus on creating their tweets, or do they curate content?
- Do they have a specific posting time that helps them perform well?
- Are they sticking to serious content, or do they incorporate entertaining content too?
By understanding what type of content your competitors share, you can develop a strategy for creating content to stand out from the crowd.
An important aspect is learning from their strengths and analyzing opportunities they have yet to pursue.
Step 5: Observe their engagement strategy
Understanding how to engage people on social media is important to see effective results. Before you get started, look at what your competitors are doing to get a baseline of what you need to do.
Some engagement details to track are:
- How actively do they respond to replies on tweets
- If they are retweeting tweets their audience mentions them in
- If they are creating polls (and how many responses they are getting)
Try not to mimic how they engage with their audience, but use what you learn from observing them to improve your engagement strategy. You should consider their:
- Frequency
- Tone
- Engagement with their audience and other business accounts
Analyzing multiple competitors on Twitter the easy way
Here are the only steps you need to carry out a meticulous Twitter competitor analysis:
Add the Twitter profiles of your competitors to Keyhole’s Profile Analytics
- After logging into your Keyhole account, click on the ‘Profile Analytics’ tab.
- In the screenshot above, you will see an orange button that says “add new profile”. In the dropdown, click on “Create new comparison”. Once you do that, you will see the page attached in the screenshot below.
- Enter your brand’s name and the competitors’ profiles you would like to analyze. Once you enter the names, the “create comparison” button will turn orange. Click on it to proceed.
- Now all you have to do is wait for Keyhole to work its magic.
Create a comparison report
Once Keyhole compiles data on your competitor’s Twitter engagement, you can analyze that data to identify trends.
With this information, you can schedule your posts better and use the right content formats. Be sure to schedule posts at these optimal times and days based on your data and the insights you get from the Twitter competitor analysis report.
Your social media engagement will improve when you start tweaking your strategy based on these reports. What’s more, you can even do the following:
- Determine the dates you want to track
- Share your report
- Download the insights into 3 different formats: Google Sheets, PDF, and XLS
- Sort the data based on your requirement
You can even save these searches to come back to them later.
Are you still wondering how to conduct a Twitter competitor analysis in just a few clicks? Check out our video.
Conclusion
Your Twitter marketing strategy is far more complex than simply pushing tweets out to all your followers.
If you are trying to get people to take an interest in your product, you’ll have to think about the following:
- social media trends
- competitor research
- how your product differs from your competitors
- how you’re going to market it successfully
Enters Keyhole!
With our Twitter competitor analysis feature, you can closely monitor the powerful players in the market. This knowledge can help you create a stellar content plan that pulls in more of your target audience.
What’s more, you can eventually build a community of brand advocates who can follow you across platforms.
Related Articles:
How to Perform a Social Media Competitive Analysis
Top 7 Social Media Competitor Analytics Tools For Marketers And Agencies
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you analyze competitors on Twitter?
The first step is to analyze who your Twitter competitors are. Next, study their audience and content. After this, you will need to observe how they engage with their audience. Finally, look for opportunities to pursue where your competitor is lacking.
Is there a Twitter tool to analyze another user?
Twitter’s analytics allow you only to study your own metrics. So, opt for a third-party tool with a Twitter analysis feature that allows you to monitor your competitors frequently.
Which Twitter Analytics tool is the best?
The best Twitter analytics tools are:
1. Keyhole
2. Brandwatch
3. Hootsuite
4. Buffer
5. Twitonomy
