4 Reasons to Follow Your Competitors on Social Media

Every business and nonprofit has a competitor, someone with a similar product or service to you. While some players are aggressive and some passive, being a good sport and following your competition online (and actually looking at their content!) can have its benefits. Don’t believe us? Here are our four top reasons to follow your competitors on social media:

Know Your Competition

Not only identifying your competition, but also similar businesses and nonprofits that you admire, will help you develop your own branding. All these similar brands have their own differences, so what makes yours unique?How do you verbalize that on social media?

Knowing who’s your immediate competition can help you build information on your industry from a different perspective. How’s your competition doing? How have they grown in the past couple of years? What have they succeeded and not succeeded in? What’s their branding and approach to social media?

Make Observations

Following your competition is half the work. This is an opportunity to take a look at what kind of content they are using and their different approaches to social media marketing. What kind of content leads to the most engagement? Which content is the most well received? What are the comments like? What’s working and what’s not? What do you like and don’t like about what they’re doing?

Find Inspiration

Your competitors do not necessarily have to be your enemy. You have a lot more in common with you then initially perceived. They often have the same goals and messaging that goes into their social media for their audience. This is an opportunity to find inspiration from them. You can even find other people to connect with or even more sources of inspiration and information.

Know What’s Up

Having your competitors on your feed gives you immediate access to regular news on relevant industry news and trends in social media marketing for your specific industry. How are they promoting their content? How are they using social media channels differently? What software or mediums are they using? More importantly, how are their followers responding?