This post is NOT about improving your social media presence but using your competitors social media presence to benefit your business!
Spying is not something new in business. It’s as ancient as the most ancient tactics used by traders of the olden days. However, these days we’d much rather give it a nicer term, something like market research. Whatever you may call it, thanks to social media, it has become a lot easier to get more information about your competition nowadays. The only thing you need to do now after all is visit their pages or add them as friends or become a fan of their account. Of course, you’ll have to use a pseudo account to not be too obvious. This will help their statistics since it’ll be one more fan for them but what is one fan compared to the wealth of information you can get?
So what information can you exactly get about your competition?
latest and upcoming marketing efforts – Businesses use social media for marketing. They like to give promos to their social media fans and also make announcements via social media. This will help you determine the kind of promotions they are offering, just how much effort they are pouring into a certain product, and will give you an idea of their overall marketing strategy.
the number of customers – Of course, the actual number of customers will not be reflected on the social media site but the number of fans/friends is a good indicator of how many customers are happy enough with their product/service to want to be associated with the company, even if only via social media site.
customer feedback – Always always keep an eye out for the buzz on your competitor on social media sites. In facebook read people’s comments. In twitter search for your competitor as keyword. You want to make sure you know how they are perceived and what it is about them that drives up customer satisfaction.
