Marketing is all about learning from experience and becoming better, but you don’t have to be limited strictly to your company’s experience. Competitor intelligence is an incredible source of insights for your brand, and with a large part of marketing moving online, it’s now easier than ever to analyze your competition provided that you’re using the right tools.
Competitor analysis tools help make your analysis more structured and efficient. With the insights you get from a tool, you can pinpoint what audiences, metrics and tactics you should be prioritizing in your own business strategy.
Let’s go through the list of popular competitor analysis tools and see how they can deliver valuable strategic insights.
1. Awario
Awario is a social listening tool that allows you to analyze anything online, including your competitors. It finds mentions of their brands, products, key persons, and anything else you can think of, and breaks them down based on a variety of metrics. It covers all the major social media platforms and the rest of the web.
Since the software’s settings are extremely flexible, you can use Awario to analyze any aspect of your competitors’ strategy online. The tool can even help identify your competitors — simply set up an alert for industry-related terms to find competitors promoting their brands on social and the web. From there, you can start monitoring your competitors and their campaigns and analyze online data around them.
Awario will show you which features and products from your competitors are mentioned the most, what customers like and dislike about them, what content resonates the most with their audience, which platform brings them the most impressions, and so on. You can set the app to notify you each time your competitor announces a new product to make sure you always stay on top of competitor analysis.
Awario does a superb job of visualizing all this data in a comprehensive manner. One of its most useful features is the Alert Comparison report which allows you to compare several brands, including your own, and calculate a share of voice for each brand.
All the insights Awario finds can be exported and sent to your team and stakeholders.
Key features
- Sentiment analysis.
- Share of voice analysis benchmarks your brand awareness level against your competitors.
- Influencer analysis shows the prominent voices and platforms promoting your competitors.
Online platforms covered
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, news websites, blogs, and the web.
Pricing
Awario offers a free trial and once it ends the prices start at $29 per month.
2. Fanpage Karma
While Awario analyzes the activity of your competitors AND their audience online, Fanpage Karma focuses solely on the analysis of your competitors’ profiles and pages. It breaks down their social activity, giving you information about their posting schedule, engagement rates, reach, number of followers, and more.
This competitor analysis tool will be especially useful for refining your own online strategy — seeing what type of content brings your competitors more followers and engagement may inspire you to try something similar.
For a page analytics software, it is incredible how many insights on public profiles Fanpage Karma can give you. The tool’s Analytics tab displays a profile’s engagement and growth rate, top posts, frequency of posting, engagement by day and time, post types, and other metrics.
Fanpage Karma provides social media management functionality as well. You can schedule and publish posts and interact with your followers right from the dashboard. The app enables you to add team members and track their activity on your brand’s social media profiles. Fanpage Karma also offers useful modules such as Good Luck Fairy to help manage Facebook promotions.
Key features
- Social media profile comparison.
- Visualized reports.
- Scheduling and publishing social media posts.
Online platforms covered
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest.
Pricing
A free plan is available. Subscription starts from $450/month.
3. Unmetric
Unmetric is an Enterprise-level solution that uses data processing and AI to spy on your competitors’ social media activity.
Its Track app enables you to create a stream of all the content shared by your competitors on social media and evaluate it right on the spot. You can add your competitors by hand or use Unmetric’s machine learning capabilities to identify your industry leaders and start tracking their performance.
The highlight of the software is its AI called Xia. It analyzes your competitors’ social media content strategy and notifies you whenever something out of the ordinary is happening. It’s also able to shine a light on top content, hashtags, and influencers in your industry and identify promoted posts so you can see where your competitors are investing their social media budget.
To simplify the implementation of competitor intelligence insights to your own social media strategy, the tool enables you to benchmark your metrics against those of your competitors, with share of voice and engagement being the most important ones. The content is ranked based on the average engagement, so you can easily see which posts invoke the most feedback from users. One metric that stands out is the average response time — you can see how quickly the account responds to comments and tweets and compare it to your own response time.
Key features
- The Track app that allows you to monitor your competitors on the go.
- Automated and scheduled reports.
- Historical data that goes back to 2012.
Online platforms covered
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn.
Pricing
Unmetric provides a free trial after a demo. Their pricing is flexible and starts at $1,000 a month.
4. Phlanx
Phlanx’s competitor tracking focuses on one of the keystones of social media analytics — engagement. The app offers two ways to analyze your competitors: Competitor tracking and Engagement calculator. Let’s begin with the latter.
The Engagement calculator shows you the share of followers who actually interact with the account you’re analyzing. It is well-known that many platforms, especially Instagram, are prioritizing accounts that have a high engagement rate in relation to their follower counts. Phlanx calculates engagement ratio based on the number of followers an account has versus the rate of follower interaction (likes, comments, etc). The engagement ratio will help you compare different content strategies of your rivals and see what works best.
The second module Phlanx offers is Competitor tracking. It allows you to compare engagement rate for several accounts: the linear chart shows the individual engagement rate for the last 12 posts, and the pie chart shows the overall engagement rate for the accounts.
The tool is incredibly easy to use: you just put in the names of the accounts and instantly get all the insights. You can also use these features for influencer marketing to evaluate how legitimate an influencer’s online presence is.
Key features
- Engagement calculator.
- Engagement rate tracking.
Online platforms covered
Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, TikTok.
Pricing
A free trial is available. Prices for paid plans begin at $25 a month.
5. Socialinsider
This tool tackles several aspects of your competitors’ performance at once. It evaluates their content strategy, calculates their engagement rates, and tracks their growth over time so you can see how quickly your competitors are gaining popularity. You can then compare the key performance stats to your own accounts to see how you stack up against the competition.
Socialinsider provides you with thorough and automated reports that offer an in-depth analysis of your competitors’ profiles. Along with the engagement and growth metrics, it identifies promoted posts which highlights what content your competitors see as the most successful (since brands typically boost their top-performing posts).
You can customize reports by adding and removing necessary data and put your own logo on the report.
Key features
- 12 months of historical data.
- CSV export of social media posts.
- Instagram Stories analysis.
Online platforms covered
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube.
Pricing
You get a 14-day free trial after which the prices start at $49 per month.
6. Buzzsumo
As we all know, content is king, and Buzzsumo is an amazing tool to see the king’s strengths and weaknesses. The tool helps you analyze your competitors’ content strategy and see what works and what doesn’t, what type of content generates most clicks, shares, and so on.
The tool analyzes the content on your competitors’ websites and their shares on social media. You can break down their content performance by the number of key insights and see who is sharing their content, which social networks work best for them, and what kind of content gets the most shares. You can also compare their stats to your own content performance.
Buzzsumo collects key metrics describing content performance in one dashboard: number of clicks and engagement on social media platforms, as well as the number of links elsewhere online. You can see the pages with the highest reach that shared the content from your competitors and the engagement it brought them, thus identifying influencers in your industry.
If you’re not exactly sure who your competitors are, you can feed the tool niche-specific keywords and it will find brands that create content dedicated to these topics. This will help you discover rivals that you previously had no knowledge of.
Key features
- Alerts that notify you of your competitors’ actions.
- Content performance reports that include length and publication date.
- Content curation tools for discovering relevant content.
Online platforms covered
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit.
Pricing
Buzzsumo offers a free plan. Prices for paid plans begin at $79/month.
7. AdSova
Advertising is a huge part of digital marketing, so naturally, it should be a part of competitor intelligence as well. Facebook famously gives access to its Ad Library in order to make advertising more transparent — for brands, it’s a perfect opportunity to see what campaigns your competitors are running. But if you want to dive deeper into their Facebook advertising efforts, AdSova is a tool for you.
While Ad Library enables you to simply look up one competitor and see what ads they are running on the platform, AdSova gives you access to all the ongoing campaigns in your niche. The tool acts as a browser add-on and shows you both desktop and mobile ads that are currently active right away.
Mind you, the tool captures your own anonymized clickstream data on social media and the web, so if you have problems with sharing such data (the ads you click on and so on), you probably should skip this one.
Key features
- Browser extension that lets you explore Facebook ads even quicker.
- Database of 500,000 Facebook ads.
Online platforms covered
Pricing
You can purchase a trial version for $1. Plans start at $69 per month.
8. Rival IQ
Rival IQ is another state of the art data processing software that allows you to analyze competitors and benchmark your social media performance against them.
In addition to typical metrics such as engagement, the tool also analyzes top-performing hashtags, popular topics, and the most engaging type of content for each of your competitors. Based on your and your competitors’ activity on social, Rival IQ will calculate the best time to post.
You can set the tool to notify you each time a competitor posts, or get scheduled reports of their online activity.
Rival IQ also offers free benchmarking reports for several industries including alcohol, hotels and resorts, home decor, and more.
Key features
- Boosted post detection.
- Cross comparison of bios and about statements on your competitors’ social media profiles.
- Access to Twitter mentions of your competitors.
- Boolean keyword search allows you to filter social data by specific topics, campaigns, keywords, or hashtags.
Online platforms covered
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn.
Pricing
A free trial is available. The most affordable plan is $199 per month.
9. SEO Powersuite
Social media and online reviews are not the only places for gathering competitive intel — SEO competitor research can help bring more traffic to your website and boost your profit.
SEO Powersuite helps you conduct a thorough check-up of your competitor’s website. It consists of four different modules and each has its own unique set of features. With this tool, you can start from the basics: identifying rivals in your niche who are competing for the same traffic you do. SEO Powesuite will analyze their domain stats including domain age, traffic forecast, number of backlinks, number of pages indexed by search engines, and more. It then uses all this data to assign each website a strength score and rank them accordingly.
As for actionable tips, you can use Rank Tracker for competitor keyword research. The tool will give you intel on which keywords bring traffic to your competitors and shows which keywords give you the best chance to get ranked in search results.
In addition, the tool examines the structure of the rival’s website, runs a SERP analysis, and checks how optimized your competitors’ content is.
Key features
- Backlinks analysis
- Keyword research
- Target keywords for keyword ideas organization
Online platforms covered
Websites and search engines.
Pricing
You can use the tool for free, the Professional plan will cost you $299.
10. SpyFu
The last tools on the list helps inform your PPC campaigns by analyzing the campaigns of your competitors. It shows you both the paid keywords you competitors are focusing on and organic search keywords. All you need to do is put in your competitors’ URLs and you can see their paid keywords ranked by how much profit they get from them.
Key features
- Data export
- Adwords Advisor: you get personalized recommendations based on your competitors’ Adwords bidding history.
Online platforms covered
Websites, search engines, Google Adwords.
Pricing
SpuFu’s plans start at $39 per month and you get a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Summing up
Competitor intelligence saves you time and money — by learning from others you skip making the same mistakes and get inspiration for your own strategy. Of course, analyzing competitors on social media is only a part of comprehensive competitor analysis. However, being one of the most accessible channels for communication, social networks have become important marketing hubs for modern brands, and the insights on your competitors you can get by analyzing their presence on social are phenomenal. Don’t miss out on competitor analysis tools, use them to their full potential to improve your business!
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Aleh Barysevich.
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