How do I build a Competitive Analysis Listening strategy?

Social listening with Sprout gives you the tools you need to track your competitors and understand your share of voice. You can use Listening to become an expert on your competitive landscape.

Before you create a Competitive Analysis Listening strategy, it’s useful to understand how to build a Listening query. Learn more about building queries in this walkthrough. 

This article highlights some best practices for using the Competitive Analysis Listening Template to build a social listening strategy.

Competitive Analysis Listening Template

You can use Sprout’s Competitive Analysis Listening Template to set up and refine your Listening topics. To set up the Template, navigate to Listening Templates > Competitive Analysis.

You can find a detailed walkthrough of this template in this guide.

As you’re setting up the Template, we recommend a few tips for optimal results.

• Are you planning on comparing one or multiple competitors? If you’re comparing multiple competitors, it’s useful to create Groups.
• Remember to add your own brand name and any hashtags if you want to compare your brand to your competitors.
• Sprout recommends excluding your own posts so you’re not skewing your results with your own content.

Adding competitors

You can group brand names and keywords to surface conversations about specific products, promotions or features. For example, this query would pull in any mentions of lattes, frappuccinos or pumpkin spice that are alongside the word, hashtag or user Starbucks.

In addition to excluding your own posts, it’s also useful to exclude a competitor’s content so you’re just hearing from the audience.

Make sure you’re comparing brands and products that have enough similarities. For example, a topic that compares a large, international fast food chain and a local restaurant probably won’t give you much insight. Consider limiting your comparisons to similar types of retailers and products.

Performance

The Performance tab gives you an overview of how your brand is performing. Sprout calculates your Share of Voice, the number of matching messages to the competitor, divided by the total number of messages for the Topic.

You can dig deeper into these insights by exploring different widgets under Performance. The Network Overview widget shows metrics like sentiment, volume and engagements across different networks.

Scorecard

The Competitor Scorecard tab provides granular insights into a number of competitive metrics. You can choose to explore data like share of voice, sentiment and more in a table format.

Other competitive insights

If you’re on the Professional or Advanced Plans, you can use Sprout’s Competitor Reports.

The Competitor Performance Report provides in-depth analysis of how your performance compares to your competitors. You can also get network-specific insights from the Twitter, Facebook and Instagram Competitors Reports. Combined with Listening, these reporting features give you the tools to track what conversations are happening around your competitors and their impact on social engagement.