Research: It’s not very glamorous or creative – but it’s an essential part of any successful social media strategy.
No matter what sort of clients you’re working with, it’s important to know everything you can about both their customers AND their competitors.
The more information you can gather about your client’s target market, the easier it will be to create highly relatable content that speaks directly to them.
The more you know about your client’s competitors, the better you can identify opportunities to differentiate & stand out in the crowd.
Ready to dive deep into the data?
Here are the best market research tools for social media managers…
1 | Sprout Social
Sprout Social helps you to understand competitor performance on social media from multiple angles and data points. You can use Sprout’s suite of competitive reports to assess and optimize your social strategy with rich data points you can track across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
This tool allows you to get a sneak peek at what your competitors are posting and benchmark your growth against the average of the profiles being compared. You can even tap into publicly available social conversations to quickly find out how consumers feel about your client’s competitors’ products and services, as well as examine their voice in the industry.
2 | Rival IQ
With Rival IQ's competitive social media analytics tools, you’ll quickly see where your competitors are focusing their energy.
By adding competitive analysis to your social media reporting, you’ll find more opportunities to increase engagement with your audience. Uncover your competition’s strategies and priorities using powerful analysis tools for popular topics, hashtags, and top-performing content.
You can even run a totally free Head-to-Head report against your main competitor on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, and see how you stack up – we can tell you, we are big fans of this feature!
3 | SparkToro
SparkToro is an audience research tool that shows the websites your customers visit, social accounts they follow, hashtags they use, and more — so you can do marketing that works.
Back in the day, if you wanted to understand what influenced your client’s customers, you'd spend hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars on market research surveys that can't deliver comprehensive, accurate information.
SparkToro analyzes millions of public social and web profiles to reveal demographics, behavioral traits, discussion topics, and other crucial audience research in seconds!
You can try this platform for free – using prompts like “my audience frequently talks about” or “my audience follows the social account” and the enter your own information to reveal lists of business, places & people to pay attention to.
