Managing social media for your business or workplace can be a challenge. How often should you post? What metrics are actually worth tracking? Which photos or videos have performed the best? What sort of content should you be posting? What ads should you be running?

One simple way to set yourself on the right path is to see what your competitors are doing and either take a few cues or do the exact opposite! Looking at what they are posting, images, videos and copy is a great start. Take note of the engagement they’re getting on posts and see if you can identify any key content pillars that resonate with customers.

As useful as that approach is (and it certainly is useful) there's only so much you can learn from creeping around on social profiles. To get even creepier, we’ve got 5 handy competitor analysis tools to help you check in on the competition.

1. Facebook Ad Transparency

This is probably familiar to most digital marketers, but the wider population might not have seen it before. Facebook have been ‘gently encouraged’ to be more transparent with their advertising methods in recent times and have introduced page transparency. You can find the Page Transparency section of any business by opening their Facebook profile on your desktop browser and checking the left side of the page. This applies to any business; from your corner store, to Coles & Woolies, and even as far as Donald Trump’s election campaign (Click here to see how much he spent).

What’s cool about Page Transparency is that by clicking “ad summary” you can view every ad running from that page. While you can’t see who is being targeted, you can get a good idea of the written copy and image combos and see when an ad campaign kicked off. Handy stuff when spying on the competition or taking a few cues from a brand you love!

There’s a bunch more cool things that Page Transparency can provide, like spend on political messaging, ads in other countries, locations of page managers and ads by platform.

2. Facebook Pixel Helper

The Facebook Pixel Helper is a handy tool for competitor analysis. It allows digital marketers to see if your potential customer, or direct competitor, is running a remarketing funnel from their website.

Before we go too deep, you might be asking “so…what’s a Pixel anyway?”

Facebook Pixel is probably Zuck’s most powerful marketing tool, and the main reason why you often feel as though sellers on Facebook and Instagram are reading your mind. Simply put, the Facebook Pixel is a line of code inserted into a website, which records users visiting the site and saves them into an audience in Facebook Business Manager. If you’ve installed a pixel on your site, you can target this group with advertisements for up to 6 months (For more on the Facebook Pixel, click here).

The Pixel Helper is a Google Chrome Plugin which gives you a small notification when there’s a pixel attached to a web page. Clicking the icon gives you the Pixel ID number and what is being tracked by the pixel on that page. For example, this page will currently be tracking you as a page viewer and will allow MITP to pester you with ads for the next six months (sorry).

While you can’t see the audiences, ads or data, seeing the pixel is enough to indicate your competitor is running a remarketing funnel. If they’re doing it - you should too!

3. Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer is a very handy tool to find out what platform a website is built on and what plugins they might be using, without having to comb through lines of code. It also makes you look like a coding legend in meetings when you tell a business owner a whole bunch of things they don’t know about their website.

Wappalyzer is a chrome plugin that allows you to see key information about how a website has been constructed. i.e script types, hosting, plugins used, e-commerce platforms, SEO tools, linked analytics and embedded video players. In their own words:

“Wappalyzer products provide sales and marketing teams with technographic insights and tools for lead generation, market analysis and competitor research.
We track over a thousand web technologies across millions of websites. We know who uses your software and that of your competitors.”

Sick!

This one is perfect for business owners and managers who aren’t familiar with the technical ins and outs of their current website and digital marketing setup. Wappalyzer provides you with an easy-to-read snapshot of the website setup, allowing you to quote work or fix problems on the fly. For example if you can already see that a client has a Shopify store setup, you know it’ll be easier to set up and run Facebook Dynamic Ads.

4. Falcon Benchmark (Unmetric)

Now part of the Falcon family. Unmetric is a social benchmarking tool that allows you to compare your own social presence to your competitors or brands you admire.

“Unmetric offers social media analytics across major social networks to help marketers at brands and agencies create a better social media strategy.”

Unmetric has dozens of cool features you can read about here, but I’ve picked out a few of the best for a short overview.

• Benchmark your engagement against competitors - A report which shows how your engagement levels stack up compared to the business down the street. Are you doing better or worse? What can you learn from their approach?
  
• Review Competitors ads - This saves you the time of going to “page transparency’ for each individual competitor and puts all ads in one easy to access place. This helps you justify your own paid approach. You can track, measure, and analyse every campaign in your industry to find out what works for your competitors and what doesn’t. Detect promoted campaigns, benchmark your campaigns against competitors’, and see which campaign resonated best with audiences in your industry.
  
• Share of Voice Calculator - You can find out how loud you are in your industry. You can compare your share of voice against that of your competitors’ and also receive real-time alerts when your keywords are used in the market.
  
• Review of past competitor content - To save you trawling endlessly through years of past content, Unmetric allows you to quickly search a competitor’s content by year making it easy to review past seasonal campaigns when planning your future marketing efforts.

It’s certainly worth taking a look at all the features of Unmetric and how it could help you get a leg up on the competition. It ain’t free, but it’s a hell of a tool.

5. Hunter

More of a special mention and certainly a salesman’s best friend. Hunter is a plugin that scrapes the net for email addresses and serves them up on a silver platter. If it can’t find someone's email address, Hunter will try to give you the most common pattern that company uses. For example here at MITP we always use [firstname]@mitpagency.com. If you install Hunter and click the widget while on our site, you’ll be given that pattern. If you already know the person’s name you’re looking for, you’ll know how to get in contact.

Hunter is free for up to 50 email address searches, you can pay your way up to 30,000 searches a month if you’re a prospecting weapon!

In Summary, this is just a few of the competitor analysis tools you have at your disposal to help find new business, catch up with competitors or just have a look at what some people you admire are up to.

We’d love to hear if you have any other cool tech to help you in digital marketing. Drop us a line on our socials if there are any tricks we might be missing!