You don't really know if your social media strategies are successful if you're only measuring them against your own past performance. This presentation shows you how to gauge your most popular social media channels against your competitors, and how an honest execution of this exercise can lead to increased budget and staff for your social media programs.

2. Watching Your Back:
Competitive Analysis in Social Media
Joe Vargo
Interactive Marketing Strategist
Experience Columbus
@Joe_ExpCols

3. What is Competitive Analysis?
• A process to benchmark your progress against a
standard other than your past progress
• An honest accounting of your performance compared to
that of your competition
• A way to gain market insights

4. Why Is Competitive Analysis Important?
Checking in on your competition can give you insight into:
• Who their audiences are
• Their areas of product strength and weakness
• The passion of their audiences for their brand
• Successful and unsuccessful tactics
You may be improving month-over-month, but that’s not
enough to demonstrate success
Results help you make a case to your CEO and Board for:
• Increased budgets and staff
• A believable reporting of your success

5. Who Is My Competition?
If your set is not already identified, you can select a set based on:
• Businesses/DMOs your sales team routinely competes against for meetings
• Businesses/destinations in your geographic region of similar size
• Businesses/destinations on a broader scale that serve a similar audience
Don’t forget to:
• Get buy-in on the list from your CEO and Board
• Watch businesses/DMOs aspirationally

6. What to Measure
Platforms and social channels you’re active on, and others that are commonly used in your
industry.
• YouTube
• Blogs
• Pinterest
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
Community size is helpful to track, but interactions are more meaningful to report
Staff deployment and budgets

7. How to Measure: Blogs
Difficult to be objective and most traffic comparing sites don’t catalog blogs of this size – enlist
non-biased help
Quality:
Is the content visually appealing?
Large blocks of text or long lists of events?
Typos and other errors?
Does the content inspire you to travel? * Most important
Frequency:
How many posts per week?
Consistent over the past three months?
Voice:
Is the content authentic?
Are there authors’ names attached? Are they all employees?

8. How to Measure: Facebook
All data you need are publically available within Facebook
•
•
•
•
•
Number of fans
Growth in fans over time
Number talking about * Most important
Percentage of fans talking about
Any interesting tabs, promos, etc.

9. How to Measure: Twitter
Interaction data are harder to come by and you need a
third-party tool to measure effectively
• Number of followers
• Growth in followers
• Interaction (Retweets, mentions and favorites)* Most
important
• Topics, frequency, voice

10. How to Measure: YouTube
YouTube provides publically accessible viewer data under
“About”
•
•
•
•
•
Lifetime total views
New videos
Growth in views over time * Most important
Themes of new videos
New subscribers

11. How to Measure: Instagram
There aren’t great competitive analysis tools for Instagram yet,
except a calculator
•
•
•
•
•
Number of followers
Growth in followers over time
Interactions (likes and comments) * Most important
Average interactions per photo posted
Content and perspective of photos

12. How to Measure: Pinterest
There has been consolidation in Pinterest metrics sites, and
there is no good competitive tool
•
•
•
•
Number of followers
Growth in followers over time
Growth in pins
Interactions (favorites, comments, repins) * Most important

13. How Do I Report My Findings
• A defensible, written report detailing your
methodology is important
• An infographic with pared down data in chart form
makes it easy to understand for those not versed in
social media
• Be brutally honest – this process is useless if you
aren’t
%Growth in Fans since
August 2012
120.00%
100.00%
80.00%
60.00%
40.00%
20.00%
0.00%
% of Fans Interacting
Charlotte
Cincinnati
Cleveland
Columbus
Detroit
Indianapolis
Kansas City
Louisville
Milwaukee
Minneapolis
Nashville
Pittsburgh
St. Louis
Charlotte
Cincinnati
Cleveland
Columbus
Detroit
Indianapolis
Kansas City
Louisville
Milwaukee
Minneapolis
Nashville
Pittsburgh
St. Louis
20.00%
15.00%
10.00%
5.00%
0.00%

14. How Do I Report My Findings
• Don’t forget to include anecdotes and best
practices from the best of your competition
• Create a top-line report to share with all your
stakeholders
• Create a detailed report for your internal team
• Frequency: 2-4 times/year
• Budget 1 day of time per analysis