Social media can be used to set up alerts, seek out trends, and keep tabs on influencers in order to stay competitive in your industry. This article highlights some tools and tactics in order to keep up with your competition.
The fact that social media can be used as an asset for your B2B business is not new information. It’s one thing to be active as a company on social media by sharing valuable content with your audience and creating brand awareness, but you can take social media a step further. Social media can be leveraged to monitor your B2B competitors and help your business get noticed among the noise. By following these tips, your B2B business can build a better relationship with your customers, stay competitive in the marketplace, and improve your ROI.
Set Up Alerts
There are many tools circling the web that allow you to create custom news feeds to keep an eye on competitors’ activities. If you don’t have the time to browse through different tools to check the status of your competition, Google can do all the dirty work for you! You can set up Google alerts so that every time your competitors are mentioned in the media or publish a new blog post, you are instantly informed. This tactic allows you to keep tabs on the competition’s public-facing strategy so that you can make sure your strategy is more unique and effective.
Other spying tools out there are private Twitter lists, Feedly accounts, RSS feeds, Tweetdeck, and Facebook Pages to Watch that allow you to observe which platforms your competitors are using, how often they are posting, and the level of engagement they are gaining from their posts. By using a variety of existing social media tools to your advantage, you can discover new effective tactics and platforms for your industry.
Seek Out The Trends
Another way social media can be used to monitor your competition is by showing you which competitors’ content is most popular and why. There are various social media tools that enable B2B marketers to view the most shared content and find out which keywords are performing the best. However, keep in mind that your competitors are probably spending money to rank high on these keywords, so it’s essential to find keywords that are popular but not highly competitive.
Keyword monitoring tools such as SEMRush and BuzzSumo help you search for the best-performing content associated with a specific keyword, and they monitor your brand’s position in keyword ranks. Leveraging these tools saves you time researching and writing because they offer insights into which topics your audience is interested in and which content you should keep producing.
Keep Tabs On Influencers
More than just keeping an eye on your competitor's’ content, analyze who is discussing and sharing that content to get a better idea of who your audience is. These are the kinds of people who are truly interested in your industry and can positively impact your business. Follow your industry’s influential executives, bloggers, and analysts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ to see who is following them.
You can use tools like Hootsuite Syndicator to stay up to date with what these influencers are posting on their blogs or websites. By seeing who comments on and shares the content, B2B marketers can gain a better understanding of who their target should be and then create content that speaks to them. Keeping an eye on the influencers in your industry can help you gain the following insights: personal feelings about your industry, brand or products; what features or products your audience is looking for; and where your audience lives online.
Your company doesn’t have to be on every social media platform or use every tool out there to be successful. Let’s be honest, no one has that much time to spy on the competition when you could be focusing your efforts elsewhere. Just use a few of these methods to find out what your B2B competitors are doing online and evaluate what’s working for them and what isn’t. Then, learn how you can apply this knowledge to your own business so that you can differentiate yourself and be active on the right online platforms. If you have any ideas of a valuable social media tool that I didn’t mention in this post, leave a comment below!
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Jay, the CEO of StringCan, oversees strategy and vision, building culture that makes going into work something he looks forward to, recruiting additional awesome team members to help exceed clients goals, leading the team and allocating where StringCan invests time and money.
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