Outsmart the competition

• Identifying Opportunities: Analysing your competitors' influencer strategies can unveil market opportunities previously overlooked, enabling you to approach customers in innovative ways. This exploration helps discover untapped niches or specific audiences beneficial to your brand.
• Learning from Best Practices: Observing your competitors' successful approaches unveils their strengths and offers insights into learning from their achievements and errors. Embrace and adapt their successful strategies while avoiding repeating their mistakes.
• Enhancing Your Strategy: Understanding how influencers integrate into your competitors' strategies allows for the improvement and refinement of your own influencer engagement strategies.
• Brand Differentiation: Examining your competitors' influencer marketing efforts empowers you to differentiate your brand and stand out in the market.
• Resource Optimisation: Understanding your competitors' strategies aids in the efficient allocation of resources, enabling a focus on the most effective practices within your sector or niche.

A social listening tool, such as the Listening module available in Kolsquare, allows you to track your competitors' activities on social media across a wide variety of metrics. Kolsquare's listening tool, for example, enables you to see how many KOLs competing brands are activating and who they are, the time periods they're most active, and what types of content are successful with audiences. That's just to start; Kolsquare's listening tool also enables you to analyse data on a global level, or specifically in your geographic location, and to see your share of voice in the market.

A competitive analysis is a systematic process aimed at evaluating and understanding competition within a specific industry or market. It involves a detailed examination of companies, products, services, strengths, weaknesses, and strategies of both direct and indirect competitors to gather valuable insights for making informed business decisions.

Here are the key steps involved in a competitive analysis:

1. Identifying Competitors: The initial step is identifying entities operating within the same sector or market as your business. This may encompass direct competitors (those offering similar products or services) and indirect competitors (those who may indirectly impact your business).
2. Data Collection: Once competitors are identified, gathering relevant data about each of them is crucial. This can include information about their products, pricing, market share, customer base, reputation, history, production capacity, etc.
3. Analysing Strengths and Weaknesses: By examining the collected data, you can pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor. What are their competitive advantages? Where are their vulnerabilities? What are their key resources?
4. Evaluating Strategies: It's important to analyse your competitors' strategies. How do they position themselves in the market? What are their marketing and sales tactics? How do they manage customer relationships? What are their short and long-term goals?
5. Identifying Opportunities and Threats: By combining information on competitors' strengths, weaknesses, and strategies, you can pinpoint opportunities and threats for your own business. This helps you adjust your strategy and make informed decisions to remain competitive.
6. Regular Updates: A competitive analysis isn't static. Market conditions and competitors' actions evolve over time. Thus, it's crucial to regularly update your analysis to stay informed about the latest developments.

A well-executed competitive analysis aids in making informed strategic decisions, identifying growth opportunities, and anticipating potential threats to your business. It is particularly vital in staying competitive in an ever-evolving business environment.

Get Kolsquare’s Listening module! Seriously! Kolsquare’s competitive mapping tool offers a comprehensive data set specific to influencer marketing, enabling you to zero in on what’s happening in your marketplace and not get distracted by incidentals happening elsewhere. So what are you waiting for? 

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Connect to the Kolsquare Listening module, and enter the brands whose strategy you want to monitor in social networks, and you will get all the data on their performance and market share in real-time: the most important metrics, influencers to work with, significant results... It's the most comprehensive competitive analysis, in real time and in just a few clicks.

What's the most effective way of conducting a competitor analysis for social media marketing?

Get Kolsquare's Listening module! Seriously! Kolsquare's competitive mapping tool offers a comprehensive data set specific to influencer marketing, enabling you to zero in on what's happening in your marketplace and not get distracted by incidentals happening elsewhere. So what are you waiting for?

Thorough analysis of your competitors' influencer marketing activities enables you to understand their strengths and weaknesses, and identify strategic areas where your own brand can improve its performance. Information gleaned from competitive mapping serves to inform your strategy on everything from the choice of influencer, the best content format, the right times and channels to publish. The more data you collect and the more you know about your competitive environment, the better decisions you'll make, leading to stronger performance over the long term.

People sometimes confuse social monitoring with social listening tools, but while similar, their scopes differ. Monitoring tools help with everyday social media management, allowing brands to handle common tasks like interacting with comments and responding to complaints. On the other hand, social listening tools zoom out from the day-to-day, offering an aerial view of what people are saying on social networks about a brand, topic, or product.

Listening tools track keywords, mentions, and hashtags across social networks to identify trends. Then, they transform this complex data into actionable graphs and insights that help brands join the conversation in a way that improves their reputations.

Paid social listening tools offer more comprehensive features and valuable insights than free tools. For example, Kolsquare's social listening empowers you to complete unlimited searches, understand your position on various social networks, and analyse competitor campaigns in-depth.

Choosing a free tool may result in your competitors developing a better understanding of trending topics and social media users' behaviours, giving them an advantage over time.

However, free options can be useful if you're starting out with social listening efforts.

Many social media platforms, such as Twitter, once offered free built-in analytics that provided basic social listening features, but they have increasingly put them behind paywalls. Additionally, platforms like Hootsuite have also changed their pricing to remove free plans.

That said, these tools both offer free tiers:

• Google Alerts: Set alerts to trigger when a brand name, relevant keywords, or competitor is mentioned.
• Answer the Public: This tool has a free tier that allows you to perform a limited number of searches for a product, brand, or topic.
• Instagram and LinkedIn:  Instagram and LinkedIn still offer free insights on their platforms.

Of course, as your influencer marketing needs grow, exploring premium options with advanced features might be the next step.

A top social listening tool will provide valuable insights, including sentiment analysis, competitive benchmarking, trends over time, and share of voice data that help you understand how much of the conversation in your industry is about your brand.

The "best" social listening tool depends on your specific needs. Here's a quick guide:

• Kolsquare: Alongside features that help you with influencer marketing, such as AI-driven influencer search with advanced filters, reports, and influencer relationship management, Kolsquare offers a full suite of social listening features. Here, you can track key data like organic keywords, trending topics, and mentions from social network users in your industry to truly understand the market and your brand's place within it.
• Brandwatch:  Offering data analysis, Brandwatch equips you with AI to dissect online conversations.  
• Meltwater: This comprehensive listening solution tracks mentions across news sites, blogs, and forums.

Hubspot, Social Sprout, and Talkwater are also popular choices.

While premium social listening tools offer unmissable insights that upgrade your strategies, every influencer marketing campaign needs to start somewhere. And there are some free tools that help you gain insights into online conversations.

Kolsquare offers a free demo so that you can sample the platform before you have to pay. Experts will guide you through the social listening tool, clearly explaining how it can help you conquer social networks.

Book in for a free demo today!

Answer The Public offers a range of pricing, including limited free tiers. You can also use Google Alerts to stay informed whenever brand names, products, or competitors are mentioned.

Other tools offer a week or day-free trial of their premium features.

LinkedIn itself offers free analysis of the enterprise-level social network. While not as comprehensive as dedicated tools, these provide basic insights into audiences and content performance on the platform.

Paid tools, such as Brandwatch, Sprout Social, and Radarr, can't currently track LinkedIn content. To analyse trends over time and identify key demographics engaging with your brand in the B2B space, join relevant groups, research competitors, and track mentions through the LinkedIn analytics dashboard.

Social media listening involves actively analysing online conversations to understand how people perceive a brand or topic. Go beyond simply responding to direct comments or messages and access the best way to gain a deeper understanding of the broader public discourse, brand awareness, and competitor campaigns.

Essentially, it's about tuning into the online narrative to anticipate needs or pain points, identify trends over time, and pinpoint opportunities to engage meaningfully with users in your target audience.

Kolsquare's features, including advanced social listening, have produced many positive results for brands.

Social listening platforms scan social networks, such as Twitter or Instagram, to identify mentions, hashtags, keywords, and discussions related to specific topics, brands, or industries. Once they collect this social listening data, these tools examine it to pinpoint trending topics, complete sentiment analysis, and report the frequency of mentions.

Social listening tools provide a comprehensive view of the public conversation around a brand, enabling companies to make informed decisions and better engage with their audience. Over time, these strengthened connections can increase sales and even become your industry's go-to.

Book a Kolsquare demo to upgrade your social media strategy today!

Buffer is not a social listening tool in the strictest sense. It's a social media management tool. It excels at scheduling posts, managing multiple social media accounts, and tracking basic post performance metrics (likes, shares, etc.).

Unfortunately, Buffer can't directly track mentions or analyse conversations to provide the big-picture insights of a social listening tool.

AI-backed social listening tools create actionable reports and pinpoint trends from complex and large datasets,

Kolsquare is an influencer marketing platform that incorporates AI for influencer discovery and campaign measurement. It allows you to spot relevant trends quickly, track brand sentiment, find negative mentions, and discover key influencers in the conversation for partnerships.

Its AI reports give you actionable insights you can follow immediately to boost your reputation and improve campaigns.

Tools like Brand24, Brandwatch, and Sprinklr also offer AI-driven social listening.