Why to go covert on your Facebook competitor for your business betterment

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Spying on your competition can be the cheapest competitive edge you would ever need

Any reputed business with a compelling online presence would be backed up by quality Facebook promotional activities. Therefore, when you wish to achieve better brand equity and skyrocket your business brand in SERPs, Facebook is a pivotal place to start. Competitor analysis is one scarcely used strategy by most companies or organizations with an online presence. There are different advantages of tailing your competitors, like an undercover detective (Magnum PI) over Facebook; some of them are listed below.

Spying on Driving traffic and inducing conversion

Create a list of your top five competitors on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Googleplus and closely watch how they work their posts and updates. Look for who they target and what gets the most engagement (likes, comments, shares).

Look for what tools they are using, such as; conducting polls? What is their engagement rate with each of the posts? The average number of comments and likes that they acquire for each post, type of posts, that have worked out well for them. Compare it with their total follower numbers. Are they providing call-to-action factors to get more customers and followers to their websites? Finding answers to all these questions can give you a solid start on how to go about planning your Facebook promotion activities.

Don’t be afraid to look at the profiles of people responding on their posts. See what they are doing and what motivates them. What are they into. If you find a common thread, such as; A Rugby team, Car racing, Mummy Niche, Blog, celebrity for their followers. If you find it you now have a great advantage and an in with your new market ;). You can now start providing content based on your new knowledge.

Customer service

Try to acquire information on how good your competitors serve their customers on Facebook. For the cause, you can even go to the extent of contacting them via a fake or friend account, enquiring about their products or service. Note down the response time, whether they are willing to offer samples of their products or demo if they are selling a service. Especially note any negatives the experience and use it to your advantage. If you read on Whirlpool that your competitors customers are constantly sick of XYZ then solve that problem in your business, by offering something concrete, not an empty Quality Guarantee.

Post Frequency

Go through your competitor profile to understand their post frequency. Look for additional factors like the post timings, the image sizes used, whether they are using tools to perform automated posting etc. Where they are sourcing their images by using tools like Tinyeye to find the source. Look for the best response times and what is getting the best responses that will help you. Take this new knowledge and mimic and improve on it. If your competition is much bigger than you, you can use this to your advantage, because you can zig and zag on a dime without having to get consent from a board of directors or go to ten meetings with management.

Paid advertising Your competitor can always have an edge if they are using a paid Facebook campaign. Try to identify whether your competitors have any promoted posts on their timeline, which can indicate the use of paid advertising. Follow a paid Facebook advertising campaign and perform a detailed research and find the most engaged part of the market they are marketing to. Now focus all your attention just on that segment. Now your advertising dollars will get much more bang for the buck!

It is imperative that you invest some time and effort to garner only quality Facebook followers. Give priority to increase your follower base and don’t hesitate to throw in a bit of money to boost your posts to highly targeted niche groups that you discovered from your competitors.

Bibliography:

Vaynerchuk, G. (n.d.). Jab, jab, jab, right hook: How to tell your story in a noisy, social world.

Appmhbio. (2016, no-date). Lessons to be learned from your competitors on Facebook. [Weblog]. Retrieved 29 June 2016, from http://app.mhb.io/e/p3pb/1