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How to automate social media monitoring and gain competitive insights
Social media is a goldmine for competitive insights. By monitoring your rivals’ social media content, you’ll learn which marketing strategies work for them and identify gaps in your own strategy. You’ll also keep tabs on general industry trends to leverage for your social media campaigns.
You’re probably dreading the stress of combing through your competitors’ social media pages, but it isn’t what you think. Rather than checking each manually, you can use software tools to automatically check the pages and extract key insights.
You’ll choose which insights to get and can receive custom email alerts. I’ve created this guide to explore the best tools for this job and what makes social media monitoring paramount for your business.
The best social media monitoring tools
1. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is the best-known name in the social media monitoring niche, and for a good reason. It's integrated with Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Reddit, and all major social networks.
You can track your competitors’ performance on all these networks, with their performance metrics displayed in a well-designed dashboard. Each competitor will have a separate dashboard, and there’ll also be a unified dashboard for comparing metrics simultaneously.
I like that Sprout Social doesn’t just show competitive metrics. It uses AI to analyze these metrics and suggest how to increase yours.
It also analyzes industry trends and suggests the right types of posts to generate high engagement. If you need help creating content for your page, Sprout Social’s generative AI tool is readily available– it creates and refines text based on your commands, similar to using ChatGPT.
You can try Sprout Social for free for 30 days before deciding to pay for long-term usage. Its pricing plans range from $199 to $399 per user per month, making it only suitable if you run a mid-sized or large business.
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite delivers in-depth social media analytics unmatched by most rivals. You can use it to track hundreds of metrics, from engagement reach to post impressions, link clicks, and shares, on your competitors’ pages.
This platform is integrated with Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Threads. You can track competitors across these tools, and all metrics will be curated into a single tab for easy comparison.
You can filter reports by various metrics and see what works for your competitors and what doesn’t, then imitate the right strategies.
Hootsuite analyzes your performance against competitors and suggests ways to help you outshine them. For example, you’ll receive recommendations to post more frequently, use more videos, focus on short Instagram Reels over long videos, etc. Hootsuite is user-friendly and easy to integrate with your social media accounts.
3. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is an advanced social media analytics platform. It keeps a watchful eye on your competitors, tracking their social media moves and alerting you about notable events.
For example, you can choose to receive email alerts when your competitor’s post gets unusually high engagement, or when a new hashtag starts trending in your niche. You can also receive daily alerts summarizing your competitors’ social media performance.
I like BuzzSumo’s user-friendly, minimalist interface, with blue and white colors (mostly the latter) and neatly arranged buttons that make navigation easy. You wouldn’t have issues as a first-time user, and you can easily get familiarized with the interface.
However, BuzzSumo doesn’t offer as many advanced tracking features as Hootsuite and Sprout Social.
4. Semrush
You probably know Semrush as the go-to search engine optimization (SEO) tool. However, many don’t realize it also has social media monitoring features.
If you’ve already adopted Semrush as your SEO tool, you can simply use its social media tracker instead of paying for a separate platform.
You’ll choose the Instagram, Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest pages to monitor, and Semrush will provide in-depth insights about these pages.
You'll monitor their engagement metrics and compare them with yours on an interactive dashboard. Your competitors’ top-performing posts will be curated frequently, and you’ll learn which trends and hashtags to leverage for better engagement.
Semrush provides a detailed view into your competitors, and it’ll also help boost your website’s search rankings.
Its social media monitoring features aren’t as advanced as Sprout Social and Hootsuite, but it’s good enough for day-to-day monitoring.
The process of automating social media monitoring
1. Choose a monitoring tool
It starts with selecting the right social media monitoring tool. Above, I’ve mentioned the best tools to use, so you can make the right decision based on your budget and required features. Sign up for your preferred platform and use the free trial period if available.
2. Link your social media page
Link your Instagram, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter) pages, and also other social media platforms, to your monitoring tool. The monitoring tool will analyze your pages in-depth before comparing the results with your rivals’ social media pages.
3. Define your competitors
Select the competitors whose pages you want to monitor. Because monitoring tools charge based on the number of pages analyzed, you should focus only on your direct competitors.
For example, if you sell customized jewelry, focus only on brands that sell a similar type of custom jewelry in the same market, not on those that sell generic jewelry.
4. Analyze key metrics
After selecting your competitors’ pages, the platform will get to work. It’ll begin tracking the pages and extracting key insights to your dashboard. Examples of these insights are:
- Follower count. You can track how many followers your competitors amass over time. This metric tells you how effective their marketing strategy is.
- Publishing volume. How often does a competitor post content, and how many posts do they publish daily, weekly, and monthly?
- Engagement rates. How many likes, shares, and saves do your competitors’ posts get? High engagement indicates a competitor is using the right content strategy, and you can take several clues from them.
- Top-performing posts. You can view each competitor’s top-performing posts, hinting at which content format works best in your niche.
- Hashtags. You’ll learn which hashtags drive the most impressions for rivals, and you can use the same or similar hashtags.
- Mentions. How often do customers or other businesses mention your competitor? Brands with higher mentions snag new customers better than rivals.
How to use competitive social media insights
With the metrics curated by your social media monitoring platform, you can identify gaps in your own content strategy and close these gaps to get better results.
For example, if you observe competitors getting high engagement with video posts, you can switch from photo to video posts on your own page. The aim is to learn what works and what doesn’t, then apply the right lessons to your social media strategy.
1. Evaluate the metrics on your dashboard
On your dashboard, you’ll find your competitors’ key metrics displayed in an interactive format.
You should study these metrics deeply and compare them to your own page. Depending on your platform, you can get a side-by-side comparison of each competitor’s page compared to yours. For instance, you’ll view a chart of each competitor’s number of likes and shares against yours.
A monitoring tool curates your competitors’ raw data and compiles it into a visually appealing format you can understand at a glance. It saves substantial time you would have spent on the same task– imagine having to check each rival’s page, jot down the metrics, and compare them to yours.
2. Identify the gaps
Outline the metrics where you’re lagging compared to rivals. For example, if your competitors have significantly higher engagement, it’s a gap that needs to be closed.
The same applies if they have many more followers or receive more mentions. You should set clear goals about the gaps to be closed.
3. Refine your strategy to close the gaps
In the above step, you outlined which metrics you lag behind competitors. Then, it’s time to analyze your competitors’ pages and understand why they fare better. It could be any of the following reasons:
- They post more frequently than you, generating fanfare from their followers.
- They use higher-quality photos and videos.
- They use trending hashtags to reach new audiences with their posts.
- They encourage customer feedback, which generates a lot of mentions.
- Competitors take advantage of seasonal holidays (Christmas, New Year’s, Thanksgiving, etc.) to promote discounts.
After pinpointing the reason, adjust your strategy to be more like the competition. For example, you can start posting more frequently on Instagram and inserting relevant hashtags in your posts.
You can promote regular discounts and encourage customers to provide feedback for your products. If your rivals post with a certain format, like Instagram Reels, you can follow suit.
Monitoring your competitors and refining your strategy never ends. It’s essential as long as you have competitors vying for the same customer base.
Remember that as you monitor your rivals, someone is monitoring and seeking to outdo you, so there’s no room to be complacent.
