Industry benchmarking: The missing ingredient from your social media content strategy

Every brand wants to differentiate itself from the competition. In order to do that, they need to know exactly what their competitors are doing so they can figure out how to do it differently. Luckily for brands, social media can serve as an important source of competitor intelligence, making it vital for industry benchmarking.

Understanding competitive context through social media

For starters, conversations on social media can tell you a lot about how people perceive your competitors. This helps you better understand how your own brand perceptions measure up against theirs.

What’s even better is the ability to analyse your competitors’ owned social media channels, which will tell you everything you need to know about their activity and their content strategy.

Many brands are already using social media to benchmark their performance against competitors in terms of reach, engagement and audience size. But you can also dig deeper beyond those performance metrics and look at the factors that drive their performance – whether it’s their content strategy, their engagement approach or their target audience.

This will help you understand what types of content are most likely to resonate with your target audience. You can then apply these insights to refresh your social media content strategy with content formats and approaches that are most likely to engage.

The types of insights you get with quantitative analysis

Vanity metrics such as followers, impressions, engagement and reach often need context to give them value. But when you analyse them in the right context, they can be used to benchmark the performance of your owned channels and content.

The key is to avoid looking at the metrics in an absolute form and instead, in a comparable form. That means instead of looking at the total number of posts, you should start looking at the average posts per day to understand how active your channels are compared to your competitors’ channels.

Similarly, the total volume of engagement as a whole won’t give you an accurate understanding of the connection you have with your followers. Instead, you should be looking at the engagement rate in proportion to your audience size.

This is important because, as you can see below, competitors with a smaller following can sometimes drive better engagement. So it doesn’t matter if your competitors have thousands of likes on their posts if those likes only make up a tiny portion of their following.

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Source: Our 'Unlocking Patient Insights in Multiple Sclerosis with Social Listening' report  

The need for qualitative analysis

Beyond benchmarking performance metrics, a qualitative analysis is important to understand the factors influencing your competitors’ performance. This involves taking a closer look at your competitors’ content to identify the tones, styles and formats that drive the most engagement.

You can perform this analysis using a qualitative freeform assessment, where you identify the themes behind the content that sees the most engagement. This will help you narrow down on the themes that tend to resonate the most with your target audience.

This is exactly what Convosphere did in our Unlocking Patient Insights in Multiple Sclerosis with Social Listening report. We analysed several pharma brands that are active in the field of Multiple Sclerosis treatment, comparing themes to identify the types of content behind each brand’s engagement.

As you can see below, Biogen is a clear leader in the space. If we take a closer look at the content themes driving the brand’s engagement, the focus on patient advocacy seems to be a major differentiating factor.

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Source: Our 'Unlocking Patient Insights in Multiple Sclerosis with Social Listening' report

Using qualitative analysis, you can understand how your competitors are positioning themselves on their social media channels.

Here are a few examples of what you can identify using a qualitative analysis:

- The prominence of their brand identity on social media – whether it’s through visuals (e.g. logos, colour schemes) or content (e.g. content style, voice/tone)
- Their use of creative materials in their social content. For example, are there certain content formats they favour? Do they create social-specific graphics?
- If their content strategy is well-defined. For example, do they consistently use a certain style or content? And can you detect their brand voice throughout their feed?
- Their ability to drive community engagement. For example, are they just broadcasting information? Or are they using polls, questions and contests to drive engagement?

This framework can help you understand which of your competitors are leading the race and what they’re doing to get ahead. You can then use these insights to narrow down on the best practices to engage your target audience.

How to implement these insights the right way

While these insights are useful to uncover industry best practices, it’s ill-advised to directly copy your competitors. At the end of the day, your followers still expect originality and unique experiences from you. So it’s important that you take those best practices and make them your own by integrating them with your brand voice and identity as well as the tactics that are already working for you.

Just because your competitors are posting quirky memes doesn’t mean you should follow suit. If humour still fits with your brand voice, maybe you could post images with funny captions instead, for example. The idea is to differentiate your brand from the competition, and you can’t do that when you simply “copy and paste” their content strategy.

Are you extracting competitive intelligence from social media?

You’re probably already tracking competitor activity using social media monitoring. But chances are that your monitoring efforts don’t go beyond analysing vanity metrics such as reach, engagement and impressions. To extract the full potential of social data, you need to go more in-depth with qualitative analysis.

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