Competitive Analysis Topic Template
This feature is only available for Social Listening customers.
New to Sprout Social? Learn more about how this topic template fits into our suite of competitive analysis tools here.
With Sprout’s Competitive Analysis Topic Template for Social Listening, you can easily define your individual competitors and create an optimized query for tracking their performance. This turns each competitor into its own data point, making it straightforward to compare metrics in trends to help influence your social strategy.
If you’re performing Brand Health Analysis as a part of your social strategy, add context to your data by benchmarking the success of your social strategy against your competitors.
Creating a Competitive Analysis Topic
You can create a Competitive Analysis Topic made up of Competitor Queries that contain keywords, hashtags, mentions and other information to listen to the conversations surrounding your competitors. These Competitor Queries then turn the resulting data into competitor-specific data in Insights. You can't include any more than 10 competitors in a query.
If you have more than 10 competitors you want to collect data for, you can break up these competitors into additional Topics by primary and secondary competitors.
To create a Competitive Analysis Topic:
- Click New Topic from the left-hand menu in Listening.
- Click Competitive Analysis for the Topic type.
- Enter the name of your first competitor in the Query Builder. Ensure to include your own brand within your Competitive Analysis Topic.
- Click Save.
- Add relevant phrases, keywords, hashtags or user mentions in the Competitor Query Card. Note that topics can only contain 2,048 characters.
- Preview the results in the Topic Preview area. Filter your results by competitor and then refine your Competitor Query to remove noise or unwanted messages.
- Click Add New Competitor. Repeat this process to add up to 10 competitors to your topic. Ensure one of the competitors is your own brand.
If you add a competitor to your topic after you’ve already created it, you won’t have access to any historical data. Instead, the updated topic will start collecting new data from the time it’s saved.
Viewing insights
After you build your Competitive Analysis Topic, you can view insights about how your competitors are performing and spot trends to improve your social strategy. Your Insights view is automatically segmented by competitors. The visualization and segmentation within your Insights view makes it easy to compare competitor performance across every metric.
Performance Tab
The Performance Tab contains a competitor scorecard with selectable key metrics to give you quick context on how your competitors are ranked against each other. From this tab, you can quickly see the following information for your competitors for the date range you select:
- Message Volume
- Potential Impressions
- Engagement
- Sentiment Summary
- Sentiment Trends
You can take a deep dive on a few select competitors or a single competitor by selecting the competitor from the right bar.
Scorecard tab
The Scorecard tab provides you with an aggregate view of selectable metrics so you can quickly see how your competitors rank against each other.
Export this view to a CSV to share with stakeholders and further tailor this tab by dragging and dropping the metrics you want to see and to remove additional metrics that don’t apply to your strategy. You can also narrow your scorecard by selecting just a few competitors.
Conversation tab
The Conversation tab provides you with a visual representation of the top keywords, hashtags, mentions and emojis for your competitors. As an added advantage, this word cloud is color-coded showing which terms are associated with each competitor.
You can also explore key metrics for specific keywords and hashtags with the Conversation Overview. This table provides volume, engagement, likes and impression breakdowns for each keyword or hashtag.
Tailor this tab by selecting the word types you want to focus on and customize your Conversation Overview to organize the available metrics in a way that’s most meaningful to you.
Demographics tab
The Demographics tab provides you with charts for age and, profile overviews and location overviews. This way you can quickly see who is participating in conversations. View the device breakdown and a detailed location overview to see on which devices and where in the world conversations are occurring.
Messages tab
The Messages tab provides more details about the users posting messages that relate to your competitors. Each message is color-coded and includes a label that identifies which competitor the message is about. Quickly gauge the author’s followers and engagements, or further customize the messages to see the likes, comments and shares associated with it.
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