Competition benefits everyone by enabling consumers to choose from an array of excellent products and services. For businesses, it’s challenging. Very few businesses know how to turn a competitive environment into a marketing challenge. The answer is social media. With the emergence of social media societies, human behavior, economics, and businesses have restructured to adapt to the new means of communication.
It is important for every business to identify their competitors and their activities. When I converse with business owners I always ask them “What is your primary objective online?” This question says it all, is it for brand awareness or lead generation. Based on those 2 pathways you are able to implement a strategy to differentiate yourself from others.
If you are unable to knock down your competitor, have you considered playing it smarter? Outsmart your competitor through social media to get more insights on their activity for pursuing their objectives. It is to your advantage to discover their know-how and how it impacts the industry.
Here are some tips to perform smarter online:
Identify your competitor’s social media presence:
Before you start, you need to analyze your competitor’s online activity. Identify where they are present and make sure you evaluate how engaging they are with the community.
- Using LinkedIn:
If your competitor has a LinkedIn presence, first thing you need to do is look at their followers and profile them. This is a great step to identify who is following their company and who among those followers is engaging. Most importantly, you can pick some information on employees and the activities they are engaged in, which will give you some insights into how they are marketing themselves. What discussions they are involved in, what sort of articles they are sharing and liking, and who are they connecting to on daily bases. LinkedIn, for business, is highly effective. I like to call LinkedIn, a Business Market, which gives you unfound information about other businesses that help you gather data on companies you want to target and pitch. Don’t forget to always follow your clients on LinkedIn.
- Using Facebook:
You’d be surprised to see that Facebook can work perfectly well for your business. Often people ask me, “Facebook is for sharing laughs and jokes, how does it aid in achieving business’ objectives”. This is where it gets interesting, do you want to generate leads? Or Raise awareness? Almost all companies that decide to have an online marketing presence have one primary objective: Generating Leads! Facebook is so smart that while you promote your page or boost your post you can target people expecting to move to Dubai, people expecting a baby, people getting married etc. You are able to target your community so effectively on Facebook. Facebook also works as a hub for everyone that are present in other social media networks. The key to Facebook is to build your company page and touch on an emotional factor in your community for engagement purposes. Look at your competitors and try to identify how they are engaging with their fans and pin point their weak points.
3. Using Twitter
I like calling twitter, the customer service platform. You can view the conversations your competitor is having with his followers. With this you are able to learn what kind of tactic they are using and you can judge its success with the number of followers they have. It is very crucial to valuate a batch of their followers from their biographies and target them. You can also identify what your competitor’s content or published work is getting most shares and tweets.
Using social media for your business effectively, will differentiate you from others that’s for sure. By gathering all of the above, not only helps you be aware of your competitor’s activities, but also helps you identify what they have missed, areas you can easily target and implement for your business.
