A Lesson in Social Espionage: How to Dissect a Competitor’s Social Strategy

Gain valuable insights about an industry, a company, or a competitor by carefully dissecting their social activity. In this example, the personal care brand Dove, the following exercises, using only public data, took about 3 hours to complete.

Author
Date published
April 07, 2014 Categories

Competitive intelligence is incredibly important for analyzing and tracking your competitors, whether it’s in SEO, PPC, or social media.

What follows is an account of how I used public social media data to dissect Dove’s global strategy to show you that if I can do it, anyone can.

The following exercises, using only public data, took me about 3 hours to complete. While I only scratched the surface of the analysis and insights that are possible to glean from this data, it shows how much you can learn about an industry, a company, or a competitor by carefully dissecting their social activity.

A few notes:

Step 1: Where is Dove?

Time: 5 Minutes

The easiest way to find Dove is to search for it on Google. My personalized search returned this result:

This tells me that Dove has multiple, competing brands, but since I’m not here to analyze their SEO, I clicked through to the dove.us link to find out their social networks presence and participation.

At the top of their navigation, Dove includes the social networks that matter to them.

The brand might be on other social networks, but it’s obvious from the position on the page that these four are the networks that really matter to them, so I will focus my analysis on these four:

Step 2: Collect Data for Your Analysis

Time: 15 minutes to 2 hours

Collecting Basic Data

Beyond just the profile URLs, I wanted to collect some basic stats about each of those networks. Information like number of followers/fans, number of posts, number of “friends” (users the brand follows), so I built a basic table to summarize and present the data.

  Facebook Twitter Google+ Instagram
Followers/Fans 20,911,970 112,000 692,614 6,349
“Friends” N/A 8,961 ? 0
Number of Posts ? 15,300 ? 27
Latest post Today Yesterday Two days ago Two days ago
Other 415,916 PTAT   853,820 G+  
Notes Have Global Pages Have multiple identities Link to the UK site Link to YouTube from their profile

 

This was a good start and I already found some interesting points I noted to analyze further later. I started keeping a running list of questions and comments about my findings.

Collecting Activity Data

I wanted to add more color to the basic stats as well as collect more notes, so I went to Simply Measured (full disclosure: I am Director of Marketing for Simply Measured) and created a data collection for each of the networks separately.

I expanded my table to include the activity data points.

  Facebook Twitter Google+ Instagram
Activity (Last Two weeks)
Posts/Tweets 32 170 6 6
Posts/Tweets per day 2.3 12.1 .4 .4
Post by Type
Normal N/A 158 0 N/A
Video 1 0 0 0
Photo 27 7 6 6
Link 0 5 N/A N/A
Article N/A N/A 0 N/A
Status 4 N/A N/A N/A

 

I went back to my list of comments and added some notes on activity.

Collecting Engagement Data

I wanted to start answering some of the questions that started to come up, like do the brand see better engagement with photos? So I added engagement information to my table.

  Facebook Twitter Google+ Instagram
Engagement (Last 2 Weeks)
Total Engagement 34,069 3,146 613 1,663
Per Post 1,002 18.5 102.1 277.2
Normal N/A 1.2 0 N/A
Video 161 0 0 N/A
Photo 1,121.4 23.3 102.1 277.2
Link 0 6.4 N/A N/A
Article N/A N/A 0 N/A
Status 347 N/A N/A N/A

 

Looking at the data I pulled for Dove, it seems like posts and tweets that include photos get a higher engagement per post/tweet, which would justify the high number of posts with photos but would put into question the lack of tweets with photos. So I added more points to my list.

The key points I’ve noted were:

Collecting Audience Data

Next I needed to collect data about the audience of Dove. Audience data is a little harder to get without authentication, but there’s still some data we can glean from the public interaction like geo-location, device usage, and time of engagement. Since the audience data is harder to present it in the table format, so I just collected the data and noted the main points about the findings in my list of comments.

I added my main notes to my list and moved on with my data collection.

Collecting Content Data

As far as collecting data on content, this is where there’s almost no limit to what you can collect. Social media content is public and you can collect it manually, use the networks APIs, or use a solution that will do it for you.

Since the posts are public, you get everythingwith them and the APIs are pretty good at sending the right information to help you decipher it and use it to analyze the data.

For Dove, I used Simply Measured to pull all 214 posts, tweets, Instagrams, and Google+ posts.

Step 3: Analysis

Time: 1 to 6 hours

I now have all the data and a good starting point for my analysis. I wanted to start by answering some of the questions I listed in my notes and then dive deeper into the elements of the data that I thought would produce the biggest insight.

When you don’t have a hypothesis you’re trying to prove or deny, the exploratory nature of such analysis requires you to follow your intuition. The process of collecting the data helps with highlighting the aspects of the data that might raise some flags, but you want to be careful about any confirm biases, looking only for the evidence that proves your point. Try to stay objective in your analysis and truly answer the questions you come up with, you might be surprised by the results.

In this case, I listed all my questions first and gave answers to all of them:

After answering the questions I listed during my data collection, I decided to focus the rest of my analysis on the content of Dove postings across the networks. I wanted to see if there’s a strategy around cross-channel promotion or if they treat the different networks separately.

I started by analyzing the most frequent keywords used in each network during the two weeks of my data collections and pulled a sample set of posts. I found that on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, there was a high usage of the various variations of the word Beauty.

In addition, looking at the most engaging tweets, posts, and Instagrams, in the top three on each of those networks, the hashtag #BeautyIs was included, so I pulled the those posts to better analyze the content strategy of the brand.

Instagram:

Facebook:

Twitter:

Interestingly enough, on Google+ Dove included no mentions of any of these keywords or hashtags. There was also no resemblance to the visual style of the photos on the other networks and it seemed that the posts were targeting a different audience with a different message.

In 4 of the 6 posts on Google+, the majority of the post was actually text, almost like a short blog post with a supporting image, rather than an image as the centerpiece with supporting text.

To learn more about the hashtag #BeautyIs, I analyzed when Dove started using the hashtag to understand the origin of the campaign. I found this post on Twitter:

This kicked off the #BeautyIs campaign across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, a campaign that is still running.

Step 4: Findings & Recommendations

Time: 30 minutes to 2 hours

Conclusion

I made the various reports I used to collect the data and analyze it public and you can access them below:

Can you find out more about Dove’s social strategy? Try it for yourself to practice your competitive intelligence skills. I would love to hear what you find. (note: you can utilize the export to excel option to get the entire dataset and run even deeper analysis on the data)

Exit mobile version