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How to Save Time on Competitor Social Media Reports

Authors: Jay Baer Jay Baer
Posted Under: Social Media
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As social media matures, the problems we solve for our clients at Convince & Convert have changed. Today, we most often help companies take their content marketing and social media to the next level by uncovering ways to optimize strategy, operations, channels, tactics and metrics.

A foundation of our work is benchmarking our clients’ social media efforts against their competitors. This competitive data doesn’t tell the whole story. Competitors may have different resource levels allocated to social, and sometimes have a wholly different approach. But, rich competitive data gives our clients a valuable snapshot of how they are faring at both the macro and micro levels.

Our go-to tool for this type of data is RivalIQ, a relatively new entrant in the social analytics scene that I like so much, I invested in the company.

What we like best about RivalIQ is that it is built from the ground up to save marketers, agencies, and consultancies like ours TIME.

Saving Time on Social Media Competitor Reporting

The software provides dozens of detailed comparison reports across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, G+ and Instagram. So, if you want to easily compare your competitors Instagram followers, content, post frequency, account description against your own, RivalIQ makes that happen in seconds.

For ongoing consulting clients, we particularly like the reporting feature that sends us an email whenever a client (or a client’s competitor) publishes social content that breaks out of the historical category norm for engagement. So, if a company hits a home run with an Instagram photo, or catches lightning in a bottle with a Facebook post, I’ll know about it almost immediately.

The software also has a terrific feature that allows you to take any chart or graph and instantly export it as a photo, PDF, or Powerpoint slide(s). And this week, they rolled out a new twist so you can customize those Powerpoint exports to match your own branding. (upload your logo, pick your own fonts and colors, etc.)If you have to prep reports for clients or executive leadership, you’ll instantly understand how much of a time-saver this customer Powerpoint option really is.

Customized Comparisons of Successful Social Content

I created a competitive set (RivalIQ calls this a “landscape”) of a few friends who are marketing/social media bloggers and speakers who are also active on Twitter. I added the Convince & Convert logo, our color scheme, etc. so that the exported data looks like our stuff.

Then, with just two clicks I ran reports showing me the top 50 tweets over the past 7 days from Ann Handley, CC Chapman, Chris Brogan, Gary Vaynerchuk, Marcus Sheridan, Mark Schaefer, Sally Hogshead, Scott Stratten, and me.

Top tweets by engagement rate (retweets + favorites divided by total followers)

Social media competitor reporting Twitter

twitter_comparison_engagement_rate

 

Top tweets by total engagements (retweets + favorites)

Twitter comparison by engagement rate

Twitter_by_engagement

The results differ quite a bit between the two reports because of the inherent differences between engagement rate and engagement total, and because Gary Vaynerchuk has so many more Twitter followers than the rest of us that he always gets a lot of engagements. In fact, he has 9 of the top 10 spots on the second list (I have the other one, a retweet of a great quote from Simon Sinek from the #ICON14 conference). Conversely, Ann Handley’s personal Twitter account doesn’t have a ton of followers yet, so just a few engagements there gives her a superior ratio on the first set of data. 

Data for Websites and Bio and SEO too

The alerting function I mentioned also applies to websites and social bios. So, when Chris Brogan and Sally Hogshead changed their websites to reference their awesome new books (Chris’ here) and (Sally’s here), I got an email. It’s super useful software. A Youtility even!

If you want to play around with RivalIQ yourself, check out all the data I for me, Scott, Gary, Sally, Ann, CC, Mark, and Sally here:
social_media_twitter_comparison_data

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