The smartest business owners out there keep a close eye on their competition.
While there are many ways that you can do this, we’re going to let you in on a little secret: social media is your best friend when it comes to watching your competition.
Even better, your competition doesn’t even need to know that you’re scoping them out!
Yes, using social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to spy on your competition is one of the hidden benefits of social media.
You owe it to your business to use social media to find out which marketing tactics are working for your competition (and which ones to avoid).
To elaborate on these hidden benefits of social media, here are 3 ways that you can use social media to spy on your competition:
1. Setup the Facebook “Pages to Watch” feature.
Facebook now offers the ability to create a Pages to Watch list, which allows you to anonymously add up to 100 different Facebook pages to keep an eye on.
It’s very easy to setup the Facebook Pages to Watch feature.
Simply go to the “Overview” section of Facebook Insights and scroll down to the “Pages to Watch” option. Then click “Add Pages.”
By adding your competition to this list, you’ll be able to see how many times they post to Facebook each week, the type of content that they are sharing on Facebook, and the level of engagement that they are receiving on their Facebook posts.
You can use this information to enhance your own Facebook marketing strategy.
2. Analyze Twitter audiences.
Twitonomy is a great tool for helping you learn what is working for your competition on Twitter.
Another perk to this tool is that you can track the interests of others’ followers.
To use this tool, you simply type in a brand’s name into the Twitonomy search box and a list of hashtags associated with that brand will populate.
If your goal is to attract your competition’s followers to your own page, use some of their most popular hashtags in your tweets.
Something else that Twitonomy will break down for you by brand is the users that are most retweeted, the users that are most replied to, and the users most mentioned.
This is powerful information to know as these are the users that your competition interacts the most with.
Use this information to visit the Twitter profiles of these identified users and consider adding them to your own network of influencers.
3. Keep track of online mentions about your competition using Socialmention.
Socialmention is an incredible (and free) tool for staying in-the-know about what people are saying on social media about your competition across a variety of platforms.
To conduct your research, you simply visit the website for Socialmention and type your competitor’s name into the search query.
You will immediately be provided with a wealth of data, such as the strength of the keyword, the sentiment and passion felt by consumers when talking about the brand, and the overall reach.
You’ll also be provided with a list of the top keywords and hashtags associated with the brand, a list of the top users that engage with the brand, and the sources of where these online conversations are taking place.
So these are just a few of the hidden benefits of social media.
Have we missed sharing one of your favorite tactics for using social media to keep a close eye on your competition?
If so, please share it with us!
To learn more about the benefits of social media, please contact us at LYFE Marketing.
