Marketing your business well in the digital world that dons different trends every other day can be really tough. Not being able to match up might make you lose a few points in the eyes of your customers but not keeping a tab on what your competition is up to is certainly going to make you lose more than just points – your sales.

In this age where social media has become the most important part of a business strategy, it is important for you to be aware of what strategies your competitors are executing on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter because you share the same target audience and the statistics count when determining who is better. another good tool to do competior benchmarking is 20/Twenty from Radarr.

Competition set aside, it is eventually about learning from their actions on social media – including their success strategies in yours and learning from their mistakes. And so, we decided to take three companies that are obviously in competition with one another and compare what each is doing to promote themselves on social platforms.

A Case Study: Ikea, Walmart And Kirkland

To make things interesting, we chose three brands that you must be using or have at least come across on a regular basis: Ikea, Walmart and Kirkland.

Analyzing the above, we conclude that by far, Walmart is the only brand that puts in maximum time and effort to engage with its customers. For these companies, the demographics make them more active on Facebook, while the other platforms are frequently updated for those few who aren’t on Facebook. Kirkland’s is the only business amongst the three that may be a household name, but is certainly missing out on socializing.

6 Things To Learn From Your Competition

Here are six things that every business should be learning from its’ competitors visibility and engagement across social media platforms:

1. Love Thy Enemy

Not really, just keep a tab on what your competition is up to every now and then such as what social media strategies are they executing – which ones did well and which ones didn’t. This is most important in cases where you share the same target audience.

2. Know Thy People

Before you jump on to the bandwagon on businesses present on the various social platforms, know who you are targeting. Every post must be intended for a specific audience. Identify the age group, the kind of language and conversations they engage themselves in and create your strategy around that. Your demographics play an important role in the success of your social profiles.

3. Show Thy Consistency

To be successful on social platforms, you must interact with your audience consistently. Businesses that engage their audience better tend to get better results in terms of leads from their social profiles.

4. Service Thy People

The one thing that your audience looks for on your social profiles is customer service. There are times when they feel your website isn’t helping them resolve their issues. So, make sure you enable posts from audience on your page so that they can address their concerns/ issues to you directly. The only catch here being, promptness! Be prompt at resolving issues, else it might just turn into a PR disaster.

5. Integrate Thy Platforms

The most common mistakes businesses make is not offering links to their other profiles across the social scape. Integrate all your social profiles and also, offer links to each one of them on your main website. Integration of social profiles ensures that once you have posted on one of them, your followers on the others are notified about the update.

6. Use Thy Money Wisely

If you are planning to go for paid advertisements across your social profiles; Facebook ads for instance, make sure you know how they function and that you target them towards the right audience. Observe the paid ad campaigns your competitors run – what they are promoting, on which platform, for how long, who they are targeting and how much of a success the campaign is. Learn from the mistakes they make, add a unique touch to your campaign before launching it.

Tools To Monitor Your Competitor’s Success (Or Failure)

Now keeping a tab on your competition by visiting their profiles can be really tiring, considering that they are going to be trying out new campaigns every now and then! So, here are a few tools that you can use to create a successful social media strategy by spying on them:

1. Fanpage Karma: This is an online tool for social media analytics and monitoring. It provides valuable insights on posting strategies and performance on social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Community managers can compare two pages and the strategies they are following as well.

2. Twitonomy This web based tool offers both free and premium accounts for Twitter analytics. Check out our review for it here.

3. <strong?Tailwind  The tool is primarily used for Pinterest analytics, management and marketing. It helps you monitor yours or your competitors Pinterest activity, discover great content and engage your audience better.

4. CircleCount This a free tool that lets you understand the Google+ strategy of your competitors better by offering extensive statistics on your performance and influence. Since, circles are the key features of Google+, this tool can also be used to find the most active, most followed and most influential people on Google+ in pre-defined categories.

5. Twitter Counter: This tool allows you to take a look at your competitor’s growth on Twitter in terms of the number of followers. It also allows you to compare two competitors and analyze their growth.

6. Rival IQ: This competitor research and monitoring tool allows you to enter infinite number of competitors and compare their social progress with your own. It gives you a quick glance at your competition’s Twitter followers, Facebook likes and Google+ followers.

Competitor research can really help you determine which direction you need to move your social media campaign in and how much of an effort and money you need to pump into the same.

If you’ve recently executed a competitor research campaign, feel free to share with us what you learnt from them!

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