Track Social Media Pages: A Step-by-Step Guide

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Social media competitive analysis involves regularly monitoring and analyzing your competitors’ activities on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The goal is to improve your own marketing strategies by understanding what works best for your competitors and identifying opportunities to enhance your brand’s presence. 

 

To make this process more efficient, using a social media monitoring tool is essential. These tools can automatically track competitors’ performance, making it easier to gather data and insights.

 

Tracking competitors’ social media pages provides valuable information that can drive your brand forward. It reveals how competitors represent their brand, engage with audiences, and perform across various platforms. You’ll gain insights into what types of content resonate with audiences, which strategies are successful, and which tactics fall short.

 

Moreover, social media monitoring tools enable you to identify key influencers and brand advocates that actively drive engagement. Observing interactions with competitors’ audiences also presents opportunities for you to attract new customers by addressing unmet needs, resolving pain points, or improving on their strategies.

 

Key Aspects to Monitor During Social Media Competitive Analysis

To conduct a comprehensive competitive analysis, focus on the following key aspects:

  1. Sentiment: Analyze whether competitor content receives positive, negative, or neutral reactions.
  2. Community Size: Track the growth and size of competitors’ follower bases across platforms.
  3. Tone and Personality: Observe how competitors communicate—do they use a professional tone, casual language, or humor?
  4. Customer Service: Evaluate how quickly and effectively competitors respond to customer inquiries or complaints.
  5. Sponsorship and Affiliations: Identify any sponsored content or partnerships that help amplify competitors’ visibility.
  6. Reach: Measure how far competitors’ content travels in terms of impressions and engagement.
  7. Content Strategy: Analyze the formats, themes, and posting frequency of competitors’ content to understand what works best for their audience.
 

Benefits of Tracking Social Media Pages

Tracking social media pages delivers a range of benefits that enhance your brand’s strategic approach and provide a competitive edge. Here’s how tracking competitors’ social media pages can benefit your marketing strategy:

  1. Evaluate Competitors’ Market Position: Tracking competitors’ social media pages helps you understand their standing in the industry. By analyzing metrics like follower growth, engagement rates, and reach, you can assess how well they are performing compared to your brand.

  2. Identify Key Influencers: When you track social media pages, you can spot influential figures who support your competitors or industry. This insight allows you to connect with potential collaborators who can help expand your brand’s visibility and credibility.

  3. Measure Competitor Success: Analyzing competitors’ tracked pages enables you to measure their success across various platforms. Evaluate their engagement rates, top-performing content, and overall social media achievements, providing insights into effective strategies that you can adapt.

  4. Discover Opportunity Gaps: By tracking social media pages, you can identify where competitors are lagging—whether it’s low engagement on specific platforms, inconsistent posting, or content gaps. Use this information to develop targeted strategies that exploit these weaknesses.

  5. Generate Leads from Unhappy Customers: Monitoring competitor pages also reveals customer dissatisfaction. Engaging with these customers directly or addressing similar pain points in your own campaigns can help you convert them into leads.

  6. Stay Updated on Industry Trends: Tracking social media pages allows you to stay informed about industry trends, conversations, and new developments. This keeps your strategy aligned with current market shifts and ensures your brand remains relevant.

How to track your Competitors Social Media Pages using Competitors App

Competitor Analysis - use competitors app
1. Sign Up and Set Up Your Account

First, create an account on Competitors.app. You'll need to provide some basic information about your business and your competitors. The setup process is straightforward and user-friendly.

competitors app add competitor
2. Add Your Competitors

Once your account is set up, add the competitors you want to analyze. You can usually do this by entering their website URLs. Competitors.app allows you to track multiple competitors, giving you a comprehensive view of your competitive landscape.

social media dashboard
3. Scroll to the Social Section in the Dashboard Page

Scroll to the bottom of the dashboard till the "social" section. In this section, you'll find the numbers of posts your competitors posted, their top posts, their new followers count and their engagement rate.

Activity-10-11-2024_03_09_PM
4. Navigate to the Activity Section

From the left sidebar, click on the "activity" section. This will take you to a page that shows all the data about your competitors, from paid ads, website changes, email marketing activities, social media activities to even their SEO performance.

Social Listening Mentions
5. Select Posts

To get a more in-depth analysis, select "posts". This will show you all the posts your competitors have posted over a specific period of time.
This will show you the amount of engagement on each post in detail.

6. Filter by Date Range

You can also filter by specific date range, such as a specific week, month or even a day. This feature allows you to see yours or your competitors' posts and social media activity over a specific period of time.

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Tips for Tracking Key Insights from Competitors’ Social Media Pages

Tracking social media pages is essential for gathering key insights that can enhance your own strategy. Here’s how to effectively track competitors’ social media pages and leverage the insights for growth:

  1. Identify Which Networks Competitors Use

    • Start by identifying the platforms your competitors are active on, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or TikTok. This will help you prioritize which social media pages to track.
    • Focus on one platform at a time to avoid “social media overwhelm.” Once you establish a strong strategy on a primary platform, expand to others as needed.
    • Ensure your brand has a presence on the same networks as your competitors to maintain visibility. For example, if a competitor is thriving on Instagram, consider boosting your efforts on that platform to capture shared audience interest.

  2. Analyze How Competitors Position Themselves

    • Examine competitors’ bios, descriptions, and positioning statements to understand how they present themselves on social media. This can inspire your brand’s positioning on these pages while keeping it unique to your identity.
    • Take note of the tone and messaging they use, and identify gaps where you can improve your own brand image to better attract your target audience.

  3. Track Trending Topics and Content

    • Observe the topics and trends your competitors engage with on social media. Use tools like Competitors App to receive real-time updates on their posts, ensuring you stay updated on their latest strategies and industry trends.
    • This allows you to quickly adopt relevant trends, ensuring your content remains timely and aligned with current conversations.

  4. Monitor Audience Reactions to Competitors

    • Track the sentiment of comments and reviews on competitors’ social media pages to understand how their audience perceives their content, products, and services. This can offer valuable insights into potential gaps or pain points that you can address.
    • Pay attention to any negative feedback competitors receive and how they handle it. This can help you prepare your response strategies for similar situations and improve your overall reputation management.

  5. Join Relevant Groups Competitors Participate In

    • Track which groups or communities your competitors are active in and consider joining them. These groups often host valuable conversations that can offer insights into industry trends, customer needs, and competitor strategies.
    • Observe how competitors interact within these groups, including the types of posts they share, their calls-to-action, and overall engagement tactics. Use these insights to refine your own group participation strategies.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Tracking Social Media Pages

Even with the best tools and strategies, there are some common pitfalls that can limit the effectiveness of tracking social media pages. Here are the most frequent mistakes and how to avoid them:

  1. Focusing Only on Vanity Metrics

    • Mistake: Tracking only metrics like likes and follower counts can give a misleading sense of success. While these numbers are visible, they don’t always correlate with genuine engagement or conversion.
    • Solution: Go beyond vanity metrics. Track engagement rates, click-through rates (CTR), and sentiment to get a better picture of what’s truly resonating with audiences.

  2. Ignoring Sentiment Analysis

    • Mistake: Monitoring competitors’ engagement without analyzing sentiment can miss the context of reactions. High engagement might seem positive, but if the sentiment is negative, it signals dissatisfaction.
    • Solution: Use tools that provide sentiment analysis to understand whether audience reactions are positive, neutral, or negative. This insight can guide content adjustments and tone refinement.

  3. Overlooking Consistent Tracking

    • Mistake: Tracking social media pages sporadically can result in incomplete insights. Inconsistent tracking makes it hard to identify trends, adjust strategies, or spot potential issues.
    • Solution: Set a regular schedule for tracking competitors’ social media pages, whether it’s weekly or monthly. Consistent monitoring helps maintain a comprehensive view of competitors’ strategies.

  4. Failing to Act on Insights

    • Mistake: Gathering data without implementing changes based on insights is a common error. Tracking social media pages is only effective if the data drives strategic adjustments.
    • Solution: Make data-driven decisions based on the tracked information. If competitors’ video content has higher engagement, consider integrating more videos into your strategy.

  5. Not Adapting to Platform-Specific Metrics

    • Mistake: Applying the same tracking approach across all platforms fails to capture the unique metrics and user behavior of each one.
    • Solution: Customize your tracking strategy to each social media platform. For example, track story views on Instagram, post shares on Facebook, and post impressions on LinkedIn.

FAQs About Tracking Social Media Pages

What is the most important metric to track on competitors’ social media pages?

While engagement rate is one of the most important metrics (as it indicates audience interaction), a combination of metrics—including follower growth, reach, and sentiment—is necessary for a comprehensive analysis.

How often should I track competitors' social media pages?

For optimal results, aim to track competitors at least weekly. However, for fast-paced platforms like Instagram or Twitter, daily tracking might be more effective to capture real-time trends.

What tools should I use to track social media pages?

Some of the popular tools include Competitors App, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and BuzzSumo. Choose a tool based on your budget, features needed (e.g., sentiment analysis, influencer tracking), and ease of use.

How can tracking social media pages improve my ROI?

By tracking competitors, you can identify strategies that drive the highest engagement, conversion, or sales, enabling you to optimize your own content and campaigns for better results. This data-driven approach can lead to improved ROI by targeting successful tactics.

Can I track private competitor groups on Facebook or LinkedIn?

No, private groups cannot be directly tracked. However, you can still observe discussions, group affiliations, and engagement patterns in public groups to understand industry-related conversations and competitors’ interactions.

What’s the difference between monitoring and tracking social media pages?

Monitoring typically refers to real-time observation of social mentions, while tracking involves a more comprehensive analysis of competitor performance, trends, and overall social media strategy.

How do I choose which competitors to track?

Start by tracking direct competitors with a similar audience and product/service offerings. Expand to include indirect competitors to gain broader insights into industry trends.

Should I track my own social media pages as well?

Yes, tracking your own pages alongside competitors’ can help you compare performance, identify strengths, and address weaknesses in your strategy.

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