Keeping Track of Your Competitors Using Social Media

Staying on top of what your competitors are doing is a good way to make sure you are doing enough to really stand out from the crowd and get some attention. If you want to succeed on social media, you’ll need to watch what your competitors do and figure out ways to best them. Luckily, social media is a great tool for doing just that. Here are some tips for making sure you’re always at the head of the pack:

1. Know who your competitors are. If you do not know who you are competing against, how are you first, going to track them, and second, outperform them? Your competition falls into three categories, the most direct competitors, those who want the attention of your audience (though may not be offering the same thing), and businesses who are using the same marketing strategies.

2. Use an analytics tool to track Facebook impressions. You can see your impressions for free. You will probably have to pay in order to see who is looking at your competitor’s pages and how effective their posts are. You’ll want to note not just how large their pages are, but also their rates of engagement. Look at which posts get the most engagement and analyze the topics, time of posting, and types of response in order to really see what you’re up against.

3. Pay attention to daily mentions on Twitter. It’s easy to look on a competitor’s page and see how many followers they have. It’s more difficult to determine how successfully they are engaging those followers. Daily mentions is one of the best ways, and there are lots of tools that will give you hard numbers to look at. Once you have the number of daily mentions, look at what posts are earning those mentions and, again, how people are engaging with them.

4. Gather data and draw conclusions. Once you have started to look at the information you’ve gleaned from analyzing their social media accounts, it’s time to start drawing conclusions. What topics are likely to bring you attention? How can you vary your strategy so that it stands out from the crowd? How can you make sure that it does not look like you are simply copying you competition? How can you beat them at their own game?