3 Effective Social Media Metrics for Competitive Analysis

With the growing importance of social media in the Internet Marketing Mix, it is important to know how your social strategy stands against your competitor’s social strategies. To get access to this information you need to analyze the “shareability” of your competitors content. Here are 3 metrics that give you quick and in-depth insight into the social media marketing techniques that are used by any site.

1. Total Shares

A great metric that tells you how your site is standing, from a social media visibility point of view, is the total number of shares that a site has on the big three social media networks (Google+, Facebook & Twitter).

This number is the total number of shares for all of the pages of a site. This metric is calculated by crawling each page on a site and extracting it’s social shares from Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

This metric is super effective, if used in comparison mode, because it allows you to easily see how your is social visibility compared to your competitor’s.

Another important thing that you can learn from using this metric is the social media platform that is mostly targeted by each site.

Quick Wins

–       How much social visibility do you have vs your competitors.

–       What social media network do your competitors mostly use.

2. Most Shared Pages

A site’s most shared content indicates what the visitors are mostly interested in. You can easily spot viral content and content that generates social interaction.

At the other pole there is the less shared content that indicates the type of content that you should not invest too much in, because it does not get social traction. These are aggregated metrics, and in order to get them, on-demand crawling is required. These charts are generated by the cognitiveSEO platform.(they also allow you to view a quick correlation between the shares and the links giving you insight in the link building vs social marketing efforts)

Quick Wins

–       Spot great content easily.

–       Understand the competitor’s social strategy at a more in-depth level.

3. Site’s Weekly Share Increase

The Weekly share increase of a site, tells you how active a site is in social media. If the first number gives you a total number of shares, this number gives you the trend of a site’s increase in social shares.

Quick Wins

–       Quickly spot old content that gets shares over time, both on your site and competitors sites