The last area we will want to evaluate when it comes to marketing is our competitor's social media presence and engagement rates.

How does our competition drive engagement with their brand through social media? Do we see social sharing buttons with each article? Does our competitor have links to their social media channels in the header, footer, or somewhere else? Are these clearly visible? Do they use calls-to-action with these buttons?

If our competitors are using a social network that we may not be on, it's worth learning more about how that platform may be able to help our business, too. To determine if a new social media platform is worth our time, we can check our competitor's engagement rates on those sites. First, we visit the following sites to see if our competition has an account on these platforms:

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Snapchat
LinkedIn
YouTube
Pinterest

Then, we take note of the following quantitative items from each platform:

Number of fans/followers
Posting frequency and consistency
Content engagement (Are users leaving comments or sharing their posts?)
Content virality (How many shares, repins, and retweets do their posts get?)

With the same critical eye we used to gauge our competition's content marketing strategy, we take a fine-toothed comb to analyze their social media strategy.

What kind of content are they posting? Are they more focused on driving people to landing pages, resulting in new leads? Or are they posting visual content to promote engagement and brand awareness?

How much of this content is original? Do they share curated content from other sources? Are these sources regular contributors? What is the overall tone of the content?

How does our competition interact with their followers? How frequently do their followers interact with their content?

After we collect this data, we can generate an overall grade for the quality of our competitor's content. This will help us compare the rest of our competitors using a similar grading scale.

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