Competitive Analysis

This data was originally featured in the January 25, 2023 newsletter found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2023/01/inbox-insights-january-25-2023-growth-hacking-secrets-competitive-analysis/.

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk through some competitive analysis. One of the more interesting things to do with public data like Twitter and Instagram data is to examine who follows you, who follows your competitors, and who you share in audiences. Let’s take a look at the process and then what we could learn.

First, we need to obtain lists of Twitter followers. Depending on your social media monitoring software, this may be something built right into software you’re already paying for. We used Twitter’s API to download our followers and two of our peer competitors.

Let’s take a look at us and peer competitor 1:

Not much overlap at all, despite our accounts having similar followings. How about peer competitor 2:

What we see is pretty clear – we’ve got very, very different audiences. Are we missing out on something, perhaps? Is there an audience that just passed us by?

When we look at the peer competitors against each other, the answer is a resounding no. No one has much audience overlap – we currently serve very different audiences. That begs the question: who are these folks? Using some basic natural language processing, let’s take a look at the words and phrases that make up our audience’s bios:

That’s a good starting point. What about competitor 1?

Competitor 1’s bios indicate a much more regional focus. They share some similar terms like social media and digital marketing, but much more localized. What about competitor 2?

For competitor 2, we see that they have more of a senior audience than we do, more titles that are higher up in organizational hierarchies. If there were a competitor whose audience we might want to woo, this would be a good candidate.

So what? What’s the takeaway from this exploration? When it comes to understanding competitors, knowing how much audience you share can be a useful starting point. If you’ve got substantially the same audience as your peer competitors, then you know you’re having to compete with mindshare in that audience space. You’d better be able to differentiate not just your products and services, but also your marketing.

If you’ve got little to no overlap? That means your audience isn’t necessarily at risk from the competitors you’ve chosen – but other competitors might pose a challenge, so investigate further. And if you’ve identified a competitor who has an audience you might want to woo, this is a great way to identify them. We’re going to dig deeper into some of the folks who have descriptions that align well with us and start engaging with them.