3 Smart Ways to Compare Your Brand on Twitter

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3 Smart Ways to Compare Your Brand
on Twitter
By Bridget Quigg – March 17, 2015
93 0 6 32 1
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 set
useful goals.
I sat down recently with Simply


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Measured Enterprise Account
Executive Kurt Weiss to get his
advice on which analyses go into
truly informative competitive
analysis. Kurt used the Simply
Measured Twitter Competitive Analysis report to highlight three key points he recommends
looking at when determining where you rank on Twitter. The following is based upon his
interview.
Use Engagement as a Percent of Followers to Level the
Playing Field
Competitive analysis is an opportunity to dive into the strategy of your competitors and
understand what’s driving their engagement and their success. From there, you can establish
day-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 follower
growth. You don’t want to latch on to these too quickly. For example, if you find you have
the least amount of followers compared to your competitors, your goal for this month isn’t
going to be to increase followers 10 fold.
Similarly on engagement, overcoming a large gap in engagement isn’t going to be a monthly
goal. Those are long-term benchmarks that you’d want to track to and go after but how you
get there is the piece that we can determine with the report.
The Complete Social Media
Competitive Guide
Download

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That’s why we’re going to look at engagement as a percentage of followers to create a level
playing field. This metric takes those two base metrics and creates a rate that you can track
against 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 doing
pretty well when it comes to engagement as a percent of followers. So, you could start a
weekly goal today to grow your percentage higher than theirs. That’s a way to set achievable
benchmarks on a daily or weekly basis that grow into those larger programs and strategy.

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Focus on Engagement with Organic Content
How do you grow your engagement as a percent of followers? Let’s dig into some details on
engagement for you and your competitors to find out.
When you see that another company has a ton of engagement, find out what it actually
looks 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 of
engagement – mention, Retweet, @reply, or favorite.
The key thing here is that the engagement you can control on a daily basis is engagement on
your organic Tweets themselves.

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You may notice that a competitor has a lot of mentions because they’re more well known
than you are. It’s when we take those mentions away that we can understand the
engagement 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 in
the analysis is to understand the value of those competitor’s mentions. Looking at their
Twitter Account report, you can analyze the sentiment on those mentions to get a sense for
what 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 Retweet
means you’re getting amplification of your message. That is the end goal. An @reply is your
ability to start a conversation. That’s a really big piece. It shows the engagement you’re
having with you customers. If that is one of your goals, being able to demonstrate that sort
of engagement is really huge.
Favorites are the affirmation of content. You’re right on. You’re speaking to your audience
well. How might you tweak some of those posts or add new things to take some of that and
turn 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 would
recommend is to go to the data behind the report and see the top retweeted content. I’m
going to go to those sent posts and sort by Retweets and I can see the top ten most
retweeted pieces of content from these handles.
With that slice, I understand the engagement they’re getting on their content. The other key
piece to look at is how often they are tweeting. This is where we can see which brands are
doing customer service as well, how much customer service they’re doing, what they’re
dedication to customer service is, and how that compares to the organic content that they
produce.
You may find that the brands producing the most organic content, rather than responding to
customer mentions, are getting more engagement because they’re giving their followers
more opportunity to engage.
Another company might be putting out less content but they have the most followers, which
might explain some of their success. Some other competitor might not produce as much
content and doesn’t have many followers, but is doing a tremendous job on customer service
so they have a lot of @replies.
Again, it’s understanding how they’re weighing those priorities. You may decide, based upon
your analysis of your competitors, to see what would happen if you increased the rate of the
content you’re producing organically to support your campaigns. Especially on Twitter, it is a
bit 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 posting
twice as much as you are so that leads to twice as much engagement? How much does that
customer 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 on
engaging the audience you do have. It’s those small wins that help you build a strategy that
will 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 for
your brand? Please share your insights in the comments below.
Get everything you need to analyze the metrics that matter
The Complete Social
Media Competitive
Guide
Download

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Bridget Quigg
Hello, fellow Marketeers. My job at Simply Measured is to tell Kevin and Lucy how
awesome they are at running the blog. Because, they are.

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3 Comments Simply Measured 
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Join the discussion…
• Reply •
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, I
suppose.
△ ▽
• Reply •
Todd Schulberg • 3 days ago
Very good article. When coming up against a large established competitor brand, new companies should strongly
focus on R/T and favourites. The favourites are just as important as affirmation your content is valid shows your
strategy is correct. R/T provide virility but are hard to achieve, this is the ultimate goal as essentially it's free exposure
to their audience which is validated by the tweeter. No matter what anyone sees, R/T is the most valuable way to
increase exposure.
△ ▽
• Reply •
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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