Unless you are lucky enough to be running in a company that monopolizes the market, it is common for you to have a constant lookout on what your competitors are doing.
In the social media space, spying on your competition is getting easier than ever.
Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are some of the most popular social networks that businesses adopt to communicate with their followers. Since social media information is publically accessible, you can easily use the data to gain insights on their strategies and their followers’ profile.
In this post, we will look at some ways you can use this data to understand what your competitors are doing.
Follow Your Competition
One of the best and effective ways to understand your competitors’ social media strategy is to watch what they do.
If you do not want your identity to be exposed in any way possible, create a new Facebook or Twitter account and follow your competitors. For Twitter, it will also be good to follow their employees too. This way, you will have a lot more information telling you how they handle their social media communication strategies.
Monitor Their Communication
Besides looking out for what kind of content the competitors are posting, take a closer look at the comments their followers have made. For example: What they like or dislike, what questions they have. Thereafter, observe the way your competitor responds to the comments. If you find that your competitors are not answering their customer questions or there is a general theme of complaints coming out from their social media platforms, there could be an opportunity to direct the customer over to you if you can meet those needs.
See What They Do on Various Social Networks
Monitoring what your competitors are doing on each of their social media platforms could give you some insights of their communication approach.
Some companies may rely on one primary social media platform to communicate their message across while others could have differentiated messages across each platform.
Take time to observe on how they use these social media networks which would give you insights and be able to incorporate these tips into your own strategy.
Keep Up With Their Blog Posts and Articles
Besides monitoring their social media networks, other forms of content like blogs and content marketing are complimentary digital marketing strategies to generate new traffic and build relationships with your customers.
If your competition is getting a lot of attention based on their blog posts and articles, then you can consider if this should be part of your digital strategy to do the same. If not, it could be one additional way for you to gather new visitors and gain an advantage over them.
Conclusion
Information is power.
If you have not started analyzing how your competitors are doing in communicating with their followers, you should start doing so.