Can analyzing social media conversations lead to a better understanding of your competitive market?
By now, most organizations have realized the value of monitoring and analyzing their social customer to provide early indications of possible business outcomes, surface insights into consumer preferences and the impact of outreach efforts or campaigns. But solely analyzing the social network specifically around your business does not provide enough perspective on how your brand is performing relative to your competition. And what better way to understand the competitive market than by looking to your social customer for unfettered, unsolicited feedback. Categorizing conversations by consumers expressing an intention and then comparing those volumes against a competitor gives you a real-time view into the current activities of your customer.
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In the chart above, an organization can quickly compare not only the daily conversation activity but further segment it by the level of engagement expressed by a consumer. In the example above, consumer conversations are categorized into:
- Engaged – represents the number of consumers, who expressed an intention to purchase, an affinity or favoritism to towards a product or brand
- Active – represents the number of consumers, who are currently at, recently at or going to a particular retailer
We’re Doing Great! Oh, Wait! Our Competition is Doing Better
But the real value of this type of dashboard is how the information is displayed. You can quickly compare your customer’s level of engagement with that of your competitor’s. You can track, in real-time, how consumer behavior is shifting relative to campaign efforts of your own marketing and your competition. Your business does not operate in a vacuum and the efforts of your competitors can have a potential impact on your consumer.
![The Future of Big Data, Visualized [INFOGRAPHIC]](https://www.smartdatacollective.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/future-big-data-visualized-infographic-2-330x220.jpg)
Knowing the intentions of either yours or your competitor’s consumers can help inform campaign or outreach efforts, like:
- 1:1 outreach – tailoring your marketing for consumers, who are actively shopping
- Multi-channel – responding to a competitor’s discount by offering your own engaged shoppers specific and relevant discounts
Monitoring to Outreach
The purpose of social media analytics is to provide your organization with actionable intelligence that can actually be used to inform how your company interacts with your customers. It should not be simply another static indicator but one that offers real time insights. Robust social media analytics can move your organization from monitoring, to identification of valuable consumers, then to outreach.
If you’d like to see more detail of how social media analytics can be configured for actionable insights, take a look at this video:
