Looking for competitor analysis tools? This post identifies 8 Competitor Monitoring and Analysis Tools that can be used to check out your competitors or analyse your own organisation’s social media performance.

Successful digital marketing strategies require more than just coming up with creative ideas and reaching out to the right people. An effective marketing campaign must also take into account what your competitors are doing. Social media can provide incredible insights into other brands, but it has also created a huge amount of content that needs to be monitored. Thankfully, there are a range of useful tools that can help you to monitor and analyse your competitors. We’ve included 8 competitor analysis tools in this post, with a summary at the end that includes pricing.

 

Performing a Competitive Analysis

Recognising the importance of competitor analysis is just the first step towards improving your own social media performance. You must then identify which competitors you need to monitor and find the right tools to keep track of them. The data that you gather must be relevant to your business and helpful when planning your next moves in digital marketing.

The basic steps in performing a competitive analysis will be:

• Deciding which competitors you need to monitor
• Identifying their social media accounts
• Using monitoring tools to track their activities
• Analysing the results to see what is working for them and what is not
• Using what you have learned to improve your own digital marketing

The key to getting useful results from your analysis is to choose a specific measure of social media success that you can tie to your competitors’ strategies. For example, you could compare the frequency of posts to the number of followers gained or lost each week. The results of your analysis should then help you to form your own strategy. In this example, they could tell you how many posts you should be making to maintain or grow your audience on a particular network.

 

Choosing the Right Tools for Competitor Monitoring and Analysis

Gathering all of the data manually would be an immense and time-consuming task, but there are plenty of tools that can help. Here are 8 of the most popular competitor monitoring tools for social media.

 

AdSova

AdSova reveals how your competitors are using paid ads online. It can reveal the latest trends and help you to create a more effective digital marketing campaign.

 

Awario

Awario enables you to monitor competitors, mentions of your own brand, or other relevant keywords across the major social networks and the wider web. The industry alerts can provide a useful starting point for identifying the competitors you should be monitoring.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is quite well-known and focuses on content, so it can help you to understand which types of posts you should be making. In addition to monitoring how widely content is shared, you can also use BuzzSumo to identify the influencers in your sector who have the greatest reach.

 

FanPage Karma

Another well-known tool, FanPage Karma’s analysis tools can break down your competitors’ social media strategies in terms of engagement activities, posting frequencies and other factors that can inform your own approach.

 

Iconosquare

Iconosquare is limited to Facebook and Instagram, but it does provide detailed analysis of your brand’s performance on these sites. The analysis tools enable you to compare your results to the competition in terms of engagement, reach, growth and other metrics. Iconosquare also enables you to monitor what is being said about you and your competitors.

 

Likealyzer

A Facebook-only tool that assesses the likeability of your brand compared to the competition. Likealyzer provides a LikeRank, which is a quick and simple metric that comes with suggestions on how to improve your page. It’s one of my favourite quick snapshot tools that shows and overview of how your Facebook page – or a competitor’s – is performing.

 

Socialinsider

Socialinsider provides in depth reports on social media activities, including engagement metrics and use of sponsored posts.

 

Unmetric

The most expensive tool in this list and designed for big brands, Unmetric can help to identify the leaders in your industry. It provides tools for comparing your own social media metrics to the competition and can highlight the areas where you need to improve.

 

Summary of the 8 Competitor Monitoring and Analysis Tools

Each of these tools has its own unique features so it is important to consider which one will provide the most useful information for your business. The answer will depend on which sites you need to monitor and the kinds of analysis that you want to perform.

 

Name	Key Features	Sites Monitored	Pricing
AdSova	Tracks paid campaigns on social networks	Facebook	From $69 a month
Awario	Sentiment analysis and share of voice statistics provide useful insights	Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit	From $29 a month
BuzzSumo	Identifies trending keywords, questions and content types and provides tools for content curation	Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest	Free basic plan, paid plans start at $79 a month
FanPage Karma	Straightforward monitoring of key metrics with add-ons available for more complex analysis	Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest	Free plan available, subscriptions from $450 a month
Iconosquare	Enables analysis of Instagram Stories and monitors mentions of your brand	Facebook, Instagram	From $29 a month
Likealyzer	Offers ideas for improvements to boost your likeability	Facebook	Free
Socialinsider	Data-rich reports and 12 months of historical data, also enables analysis of Instagram Stories	Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube	From $59 a month
Unmetric	Provides comparisons of key metrics against your competitors and access to historical data since 2012	Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn	From $1000 a month