Analyzing what your competitors are doing online is important for multiple purposes – from being inspired by their ideas, and avoiding their mistakes, to adjusting your marketing strategy in-step.

And with social media taking up a huge share of online traffic, paying attention to how to get ahead of your competitors on social platforms is incredibly important. To do this, you need to look at what your competitors do, and what people are saying about them on social media.

In order to facilitate such process, you need to understand which are the right competitors to monitor, and which aspects of your competitors’ businesses are worth analyzing. You then need to decide which audience, engagement, and content metrics are useful in your particular case.

This article will show you eight competitor analysis tools and apps that can help you maximize your assessment efforts.

1. Awario

Awario is a social listening platform which enables you to monitor your brand, competitors, or industry terms across all the major social media platforms and the broader web.

Awario analyzes multiple areas of your competitors’ strategies to give you a comprehensive overview of their efforts. The tool enables you to research who your customers are, and their behaviors on social media, so you can address all the key questions – like which social media platforms are the most popular with your competition, what content resonates best with their audience, how often they post, etc.

To kick off your competitive analysis, it’s a good idea to first find out who your competitors are. You’re most likely to know some of them already, but if you want to get the full perspective, Awario will give you a hand – just set up an alert for your industry terms, and the app will show you companies promoting services or products similar to yours.

After you’re done researching your competitors, you can export them to a spreadsheet so that it’s easier to keep track of them later. Then, set up an alert for each competitor and the app will present you with a range of necessary insights about them – what their customers are saying, which platforms work best for them (and most likely will for you), their reach, sentiment, and topics over time. It’s also important to see who has the biggest share of voice on social media.

Key features:

• Sentiment analysis
• Interacting with their unanswered posts right from Awario
• Share of voice statistics that helps measure the amount of conversations around your brand compared to your competitors

Social channels analyzed: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit.

Pricing: A 14-days free trial. Prices start from $29/month.

2. Unmetric

Another comprehensive tool for competitive analysis on social media is Unmetric. Unlike Awario, Unmetric is an enterprise-level solution – the tool helps you automate the process of measuring the social media efforts of your competitors.

Unmetric collects data from all the major social media platforms. You can measure share of voice for your brand compared to competitors to understand which of them perform better than others.

With the help of machine learning, Unmetric helps you discover your industry leaders, and shows how they perform compared to your brand. The tool also provides benchmarks for various metrics to help you understand where you stand in your industry:

Another interesting metric this tool tracks is ART (average response time), which shows how quickly your competitors reply to comments or mentions on social media. You can see if you need to improve your own ART and step into conversations mentioning your competitors to offer your services faster than your competitors do.

Key features:

• Xia is Unmetric’s AI. It indicates if your competitors are promoting their content, which helps you understand why you may not be exceeding their engagement levels
• Automated data-rich reports
• Historical Data starting from 2012 to learn what worked in the past

Social channels analyzed: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn.

Pricing: A free trial after a demo. Paid plans start from $1,000/month.

3. Likealyzer

Likealyzer is a niche tool for checking on the performance of Facebook Pages.

The platform uses its own algorithm to assign each page a rank which represents how ‘likeable’ your brand is. The tool shows you the performance of different elements of a brand’s page, such as front page, about page, activity, response rates, and engagement.

The best part is that, in addition to metrics, the tool also provides detailed insights about any page, and suggestions on how to improve it. And although Likealyzer doesn’t provide a side-by-side comparison, the data can be easily exported and analyzed outside the tool.

Key features:

• LikeRank™ is the overall score that ranges from Bad to Good and lets you do a quick health check of any Facebook page.​
• LikeAlyzer indexes Facebook pages and presents them in their Explore section, which lets you quickly find the most popular pages in certain categories and countries.

Social channels analyzed: Facebook

Pricing: Free

4. Iconosquare

Unlike the other tools on the list, Iconosquare doesn’t cover all major social media platforms: it audits Facebook and Instagram only.

The app helps you track, report, and more importantly, grow your Facebook and Instagram account performance. You can benchmark your performance against your industry by comparing follower growth, engagement, reach, and impressions history of your brand versus your competitors.

Users have the ability to manage multiple brands from a single dashboard, and automate reports. Additionally, the app enables you to monitor what’s being said about a brand and its competitors online, and engage with tags and comments from multiple pages in real time. The app also has scheduling and posting capabilities.

Key features:

• Instagram Stories analytics
• Discover photos, captions, and comments that tag or mention your brand
• Track engagement on competitors’ profiles
• Exportable Excel and PowerPoint reports

Social channels analyzed: Facebook, Instagram

Pricing: A 14-day free trial. Paid plans start at $29/month

5. Socialinsider

Socialinsider provides analytics on your social media pages, and those of your competitors. These analytics include content performance, engagement metrics, and the growth of their Facebook, Instagram or Twitter audience over time.

With Socialinsider, you’ll get data-rich reports on what your competitors do on social media. These reports include the number of sponsored posts your competitors are using, in-depth analysis of interactions with their posts, types of content and publication times.

To get the full picture, you can make use of Socialinsider’s twelve months of historical data for each social media network. For presenting your efforts to your manager or a client, there are branded reports which you can choose to have delivered monthly or quarterly to your inbox.

Key features:

• Analyzing your Instagram Stories
• PDF or PPT automated reports
• CSV export of social media posts for any account

Social channels analyzed: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube

Pricing: A 7-day free trial. Paid plans start from $59/month

6. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo lets you approach a problem from a different angle, and analyze your competitors from the perspective of their content performance. The app helps you research content, and measure its success – be it your own content or your competitors’. BuzzSumo’s listings cover articles both on your rivals’ websites and their social media platforms.

With BuzzSumo, you can see the most shared content from your competitors, and you can ascertain what types of content work best for them by checking out the media formats they’ve had the most success with.

You can also see how many people are sharing your competitors’ content. Sort them by reach, and you’ll get the list of influencers sharing the same, which can be equally useful for your brand. Needless to say, the tool provides you with reports on competitors’ performance and comparison reports for measuring your success vs theirs.

Using content tools is a great way to determine who your competitors are. You can set up a search for your industry keywords, and the app will show you the most shared content on them. The next step is looking through those posts to find mentions of companies offering services similar to yours.

Key features:

• Question analyzer helps you create content based on the most frequently asked questions in your sphere
• Alerts for your competitors, keywords, authors, or even domains
• Content curation tools for discovering and sharing new content

Social channels analyzed: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit

Pricing: A free basic plan. Paid plans start from $79/month

7. AdSova

Sadly enough, social platforms don’t provide you with insights into competitors’ paid campaigns. However, there’s a number of tools that let you track ad campaigns of your competitors – and learn from their mistakes.

AdSova is an ad intelligence tool. It has a database of both desktop and mobile ads, and they refresh their database with new ads used by businesses daily. The tool lets you uncover the virally spreading ad ideas, and use them to your advantage.

With AdSova, you’ll quickly spot rising and on-going trends. And while you’re not able to set up alerts for your competitors to monitor in real time what ads they’re posting, the app does enable you to type in keywords relevant to your industry, and it’ll show you all the relevant Facebook posts and ads. It’s a great tool for getting inspiration for your new campaigns.

Key features:

• Browser extension that lets you explore Facebook ads even quicker
• Database with 500,000 Facebook ads

Social channels analyzed: Facebook

Pricing: $1 trial. Plans start from $69/month

In conclusion

To keep pace with the ever-changing world of business, you have to always be one step ahead of your competition. And while monitoring their social media activity is only one aspect of competitive analysis, you’ll learn a lot from the failures and success of your rivals – these tools all offer significant functionality in this regard.

 

Competitor Monitoring and Analysis Tools to Help Improve Your Digital Marketing Efforts

 

PS. Likealyzer is a good tool to try out first. It’s very simple but also free. It will give you some ideas and you’ll be able to make an informed decision if you need more info which these other tools can provide. BuzzSumo is perfect to see what works well and what type of content is shared on social media. You’ll never run out of ideas using it.