3 smart ways to compare your brand on twitter
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3 Smart Ways to Compare Your Brandon TwitterBy Bridget Quigg – March 17, 2015
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Do your biggest competitors’ total engagement numbers seem too big to ever match? Or,are you sure they’ll never catch up with you on followers? Beware of jumping to conclusions.Competitive analysis requires looking deeper into the data to get the facts straight and setuseful goals.
I sat down recently with Simply
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Measured Enterprise AccountExecutive Kurt Weiss to get hisadvice on which analyses go intotruly informative competitiveanalysis. Kurt used the SimplyMeasured Twitter Competitive Analysis report to highlight three key points he recommendslooking at when determining where you rank on Twitter. The following is based upon hisinterview.
Use Engagement as a Percent of Followers to Level thePlaying FieldCompetitive analysis is an opportunity to dive into the strategy of your competitors andunderstand what’s driving their engagement and their success. From there, you can establishday-to-day measurement and activities to keep your own social performance in context.
Let’s start with two, typical base metrics for comparison, total engagement and followergrowth. You don’t want to latch on to these too quickly. For example, if you find you havethe least amount of followers compared to your competitors, your goal for this month isn’tgoing to be to increase followers 10 fold.
Similarly on engagement, overcoming a large gap in engagement isn’t going to be a monthlygoal. Those are long-term benchmarks that you’d want to track to and go after but how youget there is the piece that we can determine with the report.
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That’s why we’re going to look at engagement as a percentage of followers to create a levelplaying field. This metric takes those two base metrics and creates a rate that you can trackagainst daily and weekly to understand where you sit compared to your competition.
You might realize that you’re not getting the engagement of Company A but you’re doingpretty well when it comes to engagement as a percent of followers. So, you could start aweekly goal today to grow your percentage higher than theirs. That’s a way to set achievablebenchmarks on a daily or weekly basis that grow into those larger programs and strategy.
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Focus on Engagement with Organic ContentHow do you grow your engagement as a percent of followers? Let’s dig into some details onengagement for you and your competitors to find out.
When you see that another company has a ton of engagement, find out what it actuallylooks like to learn from their success. In our Simply Measured Twitter Competitive Analysis,you’d look at the engagement details comparison. In that chart you find out the type ofengagement – mention, Retweet, @reply, or favorite.
The key thing here is that the engagement you can control on a daily basis is engagement onyour organic Tweets themselves.
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You may notice that a competitor has a lot of mentions because they’re more well knownthan you are. It’s when we take those mentions away that we can understand theengagement that took place specifically on content.
Depending on how in-depth you want to go, I would say that a good practice at this point inthe analysis is to understand the value of those competitor’s mentions. Looking at theirTwitter Account report, you can analyze the sentiment on those mentions to get a sense forwhat people are talking about when they’re mentioning them and if it’s positive or negative.
Most brands weight engagements, such as Retweets, @replies, and favorites. A Retweetmeans you’re getting amplification of your message. That is the end goal. An @reply is yourability to start a conversation. That’s a really big piece. It shows the engagement you’rehaving with you customers. If that is one of your goals, being able to demonstrate that sortof engagement is really huge.
Favorites are the affirmation of content. You’re right on. You’re speaking to your audiencewell. How might you tweak some of those posts or add new things to take some of that andturn that into a stronger form of engagement?
Learn from Other’s Posting Cadence
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The retweeted content is, for me, the most powerful content. So, one of the things I wouldrecommend is to go to the data behind the report and see the top retweeted content. I’mgoing to go to those sent posts and sort by Retweets and I can see the top ten mostretweeted pieces of content from these handles.
With that slice, I understand the engagement they’re getting on their content. The other keypiece to look at is how often they are tweeting. This is where we can see which brands aredoing customer service as well, how much customer service they’re doing, what they’rededication to customer service is, and how that compares to the organic content that theyproduce.
You may find that the brands producing the most organic content, rather than responding tocustomer mentions, are getting more engagement because they’re giving their followersmore opportunity to engage.
Another company might be putting out less content but they have the most followers, whichmight explain some of their success. Some other competitor might not produce as muchcontent and doesn’t have many followers, but is doing a tremendous job on customer serviceso they have a lot of @replies.
Again, it’s understanding how they’re weighing those priorities. You may decide, based uponyour analysis of your competitors, to see what would happen if you increased the rate of thecontent you’re producing organically to support your campaigns. Especially on Twitter, it is abit of a volume game.
How Do You Compare to Your Competitors?
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What does it mean that your competitor is beating you at engagement? Are they just postingtwice as much as you are so that leads to twice as much engagement? How much does thatcustomer service factor into the amount of engagement they’re seeing, in either mentions or@replies and so on?
More mentions could just be due to greater name brand recognition so it’s best to focus onengaging the audience you do have. It’s those small wins that help you build a strategy thatwill help you attack the long-term goal of more followers or more steady engagement.
What type of competitive analysis on Twitter have you found most informative foryour brand? Please share your insights in the comments below.
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Bridget QuiggHello, fellow Marketeers. My job at Simply Measured is to tell Kevin and Lucy howawesome they are at running the blog. Because, they are.
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CyberLisa • 2 days ago
This was a great read. My brain got a bit bogged down by all the twitterspeak, but that's the name of the game, Isuppose.
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Todd Schulberg • 3 days ago
Very good article. When coming up against a large established competitor brand, new companies should stronglyfocus on R/T and favourites. The favourites are just as important as affirmation your content is valid shows yourstrategy is correct. R/T provide virility but are hard to achieve, this is the ultimate goal as essentially it's free exposureto their audience which is validated by the tweeter. No matter what anyone sees, R/T is the most valuable way toincrease exposure.
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Kristoforus HD • 3 days ago
Great insight... Very inspiring. I'm looking for what kind of metrics I have to use to measure the success of our efforts.This give me one. Thank you.
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