Social Media Content Plan: What You Need to Succeed
By BrandwatchAug 27
Welcome to the second part of the Brandwatch tutorials. In this instalment we will look at how to perform basic competitor analysis.
How is my brand doing compared to the competition?
As you monitor a brand (or product, person, etc), you probably want to compare it with some of its competitors. As an example, let’s assume that you are interested in Brandwatch’s home town of Brighton (England). We can try and compare it with the neighbouring towns of Lewes and Eastbourne.
First of all, you need to create the queries, by following the same steps as in the first session of the Brandwatch tutorial. You can use the following query names and strings:
- Brighton: brighton AND sussex
- Eastbourne: eastbourne AND sussex
- Lewes: lewes AND sussex
Note that we used ‘AND sussex’ to make sure that the mentions of all 3 queries are comparable. This is not strictly necessary, but for the sake of this tutorial it is a nice and simple way to get comparable and relevant results.
For all 3 queries, you should pick ‘Tourism’ as their industry. This will ensure that the sentiment analysis is the same across all 3 queries.
The next step is a new one: you need to create a group for these 3 queries. You can do this using the ‘Setup’ button (top-right of the screen), and then clicking on ‘Create a query group’. This will open a form where you can enter a name for the group, for example: Sussex towns. Then enter the name of each of the queries in the autocomplete text field underneath, and click on the query name once it appears in the drop-down list. This will add the query to the list on the right-hand side. Once all 3 queries are added, click on ‘Create group’, and then on the ‘X’ button to close the form, and ‘X’ again to close the ‘Setup’ window.
Creating a query group
Now just wait for the notification emails of all queries to come through. Again this could take 30 to 40 minutes.
Click here for a video showing these steps.
Amount of buzz
Now that the queries are ready, let’s compare the amount of buzz (online mentions) that the 3 queries have. To do this, create a new, blank workspace by clicking on ‘Create an empty workspace’ (top-left of the screen). Then look below ‘Add components to workspace’ (on the left-hand side of the screen), and hover your mouse on ‘Volume’: you will see a small message saying that the ‘Volume for query group’ component is also available. This is the component we are interested in. Click on this link to add that component to your new workspace.
The next step is to configure the new component. In its ‘Controls’ section, in the ‘Query group’ drop-down, select your ‘Sussex towns’ group. Then underneath, click on ‘1m’. Finally click on ‘Load data’. This will tell the component to compare your group of queries over the last month.
Comparing the volume of a query group
The component will now show a table with the overall number of mentions (volume) for each query, the volume for each sentiment (positive, neutral and negative), and what share of the mentions (sometimes called share of voice) each query has. At time of writing Brighton has more than 50% of the total volume. You can use the ‘More’ widget to hide or show individual columns – this is a standard feature of all tables in Brandwatch components.
Another standard feature of Brandwatch components is multiple views. Click on ‘Change view’, and you will see a choice of three options:
- data table: the default view that you are already seeing
- bar chart: this will turn the component into a bar chart
- pie chart: this will turn the component into a pie chart
At this point, if you want to export any of these views into one of your reports, the simplest is probably to use a screen grabbing utility.
If you are using Windows, we recommend using the Snipping Tool. If you are using Firefox, you can use Fireshot.
Buzz over time
You can also compare the buzz of the queries over time, using the ‘History for query groups’ component. Just as above, add that component by choosing it from the list on the left-hand side of the screen (it will appear once you hover on ‘History’). You will need to configure your new component in exactly the same way as previously: pick the query group in the drop-down, click on ‘1m’, then click on ‘Load data’.
The default view of this component is a simple table again. Using the ‘Change view’ widget, switch to the graph view to get a nicer representation of the data. You can resize the component by clicking and dragging on its bottom-right corner.
History of volume for a query group
At time of writing, we can see that all queries have some spikes in volume on different days. In particular Brighton has a large spike of volume on Oct 8, 2010. Overall, Brighton is fairly consistently higher than both Lewes and Eastbourne.
Click here for a video showing these steps.
Note that you can close the ‘Controls’ part of components by clicking on the controls’ ‘X’ icon. To re-open the controls, click on the ‘Controls’ button. You can also remove components by clicking on their own ‘X’ icon, although you will then be asked for confirmation.
And as always…
You should now save your workspace in case you want to use it again later. Follow the same steps as at the end of the first tutorial.
We hope this tutorial was useful, again if you have any questions please do Contact Us.
Accompanying videos for this tutorial