While social media was primarily a means of people staying connected with one another a few years ago, it’s now a major means of online marketing for businesses both large and small. Although marketers mainly use it directly for promotions, it has other uses as well with one being a way to monitor your competitors.
Three Ways To Use Social Media To Monitor Your Competitors
1. Subscribe to their newsletter – This is a quick and easy way to know exactly what competitors are doing off their website and what type of promotions they are offering. Due to the fact that newsletters contain extra information that only subscribers have access to, it can give you some solid insight as to how a competitor is running a marketing campaign and who they are targeting. Accordingly, you can identify their strengths and weaknesses as well as get some ideas to integrate into your marketing campaign.
2. Monitor their blog through an RSS feed – Another simple way to use
social media to keep an eye on competitors is to stay up to date with their blog posts. Using an RSS feed is ideal because it allows you to monitor multiple blogs at once in one convenient location without having to shuffle around between several websites. Doing so will let you know how often your competitors are posting, the type of content they’re posting and what their audience is saying in the comments section. This can provide you with an up close and personal insight as to what’s working for them and what can be improved. Once you know this, you can use this information to improve the quality of your blog posts and give your audience what they want.
3. Follow them on Facebook & Twitter – In addition, observing the behavior of your competitors on these popular social media sites can provide you with a wealth of information. Since your competitors will be using these sites to interact with their customers or clients, this should help you gain an understanding of what their audience thinks about a business. For example, you should be able to tell the positive aspects by observing compliments and the negative aspects by reading complaints. If there is a consistent theme of complaints, you can use this to improve your business and ensure that you don’t make the same mistakes. Along with this, you should be able to come up with some new ideas of how to effectively engage your audience in the future. For example, if a competitor was offering giveaways of certain products and seeing success, you could do something similar on your social media profiles.
Using social media to monitor your competitors can give you a competitive advantage that you couldn’t get 10 years ago and insight into their business practices, audience, and where they are going. Your business exists in a competitive environment, why not take every advantage you can get?
