Researching your company’s competitors is a standard part of marketing. Analyzing what your competitors are doing is a sound business practice that helps you better understand where you fit in the market and how you can stand out.

Competitor analysis is also valid in social media marketing. Identify your direct competitors and locate their official social media accounts. Then examine their social media activities, focusing on these four areas: branding; content formats and types; engagement; and trends and new features.

1. Branding

The best place to get a sense of the overall branding techniques your competitors are using is to examine their Instagram grid. The Instagram grid places post images side by side and in rows so you can immediately get a sense of how they are using visuals, more so than if you are looking at a continuous feed on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Not all companies pay attention to their Instagram grids, but those who do may be using some of the following methods to subtly-or not so subtly-emphasize their brand.

Watermarks - Some companies will add a logo to every image they post, typically small and somewhere along the border or as a translucent watermark. They might also include their social media handle or their website address. These marks help identify the source of the image, even if it gets separated from the original post.

Use of color - A visually effective branding technique is to intentionally use brand colors. This could be done by adding borders, frames, backgrounds, or other graphical treatments that feature the brand colors on all images. Another way to use color for branding is to feature the colors within the photographs or videos posted. For example, a wine company with a yellow and white logo could feature the wine on a yellow tablecloth with white flowers or position the wine bottle in a bed of yellow flowers.

Patterns - Another branding technique, specific to the Instagram grid, is alternating photographs and graphics or colors or even shapes or specific designs in a way that creates a visual pattern on the grid. While the use of patterns in this way can be aesthetically pleasing, it can also be a lot of work to keep the pattern going.

2. Content formats and types

Examine content your competitors are producing and publishing on their social media accounts. Are they predominantly posting videos or photographs versus graphics or are they using a mix of visuals?

Besides the formats they use, what type of content are they posting? Are they mostly posting how to videos or demonstrations? Educational or explainer videos? Behind-the-scenes and event coverage? Note the different types of content and gain inspiration for your company’s posts.

3. Engagement

While it is helpful to look at the visuals and content of competitor posts, dig a little more deeply and examine their engagement numbers. Depending on the platform, some of the main metrics might be hidden, however, you can still get a good sense of how responsive their followers are on any given post.

Look for the most popular posts in their feed and try to discern what about each post made it more engaging than the rest. Sometimes, it is down to sheer numbers. If they have thousands of followers, one might think they’d get more engagement than if they only had a few hundred. However, that is not always the case. Keep in mind that if they are paying to boost posts, this could skew engagement numbers.

You should begin to see a pattern in terms of types of posts and levels of engagement. Once you identify some of the content, features, or post qualities that prove to be more engaging, you may want to consider adopting some of those tactics or techniques.

Look across platforms to determine where your competitors are seeing the most success. While it may be easy to quickly analyze an Instagram grid, they may actually be seeing more engagement on Facebook or another platform which could help you identify prospects for your own company.

If they get a lot of comments on their posts, check to see how much they interact with the commenters. Responding regularly to comments is another tactic that, if you aren’t already using it, could help you increase engagement on your posts.

4. Trends and features

It is always challenging to keep up with all the latest social media trends and platform features. Checking on what your competitors are doing on social media could give you a glimpse of what’s new on social platforms and provide actual use cases to analyze. While not every trend or new social network feature will be right for your marketing efforts, being aware of what your competition is up to helps you better map out your own strategy.

When analyzing how your competitors use social media, the goal isn’t to copy them. Use the competitive analysis to identify ways you can improve what you’re doing but only incorporate what is relevant to your company and brand.