It’s a Fight to the Death!
You’re in a fight , and it’s your brand vs. your competitors and your business survival at stake. The old rules don’t apply anymore because today it’s a 24/7 battle to beat your competition and and serve the customers looking for what your business sells.
If you don’t win, your business doesn’t survive.
Tell Your Story
You’re in a war where your story, spread through social media is your most powerful weapon you have at your disposal. Your competitors are on social media spreading the word about their brand and building their reputation. You need to build YOUR brand and reputation through your strategic use of social media.
Today, Social Media permeates our lives and you have to not only get your message out, but you need to understand how your competitors are telling their story to the world.
How is Your Business Perceived?
Do you know how your business is perceived? Do you know if your competitors are winning? Do you know what your competitors have to offer? Do you know your competitors weaknesses? If you can’t answer these and many more questions, you are losing.
Understand Your Competition
Unfortunately, most brands don’t make it their priority to know the answers to some very basic questions about their competition. Either you don’t know because you don’t understand the need, or you don’t have the tools to measure the information you have. How do you find the right tools to understand your competition’s social media reach?
Customer Expectations Have Changed.
Customer expectations are different today than they were yesterday. Not too long ago, customers would compare your customer experience against your direct competitors. Not today.
Today YOUR customers are being trained by the best companies in the world. Whatever those companies do to make their customer experience better, YOUR customers are expecting from you.
If other companies can make it one-click easy, offer free two-way shipping, be open 24 hours per day, and send hyper-relevant emails, why can’t you?
Customer Expectations Are Higher
Customer expectations have changed making it more important than ever to build your brand using social media. Last years amazing customer service won’t rate three stars in today’s five star world. The bar continues to rise and you have to stay above the bar to thrive in the business world today.
It may sound like harping but if you fail to act you will be left behind. Yesterdays victories don’t matter, you have to improve or you don’t survive. How can you improve your customer experience?
You’re on the Customer Experience Escalator
You’re on the Customer Experience Escalator and it has it’s own momentum constantly moving and you have to keep up the pace or you will get left behind. Your competitors are thinking about the same Social Media tactics, at least the smart ones are.
Your User Experience is being measured against your competition by your customers. How does your user experience compare to the competition?
Know Your Competition
You need to know what the other guys are doing, that’s where social media data becomes so important. You have to consistently gather, study, and use the data to plan your strategy not just for your survival, but building your business.
Quantify Your Success.
What is your Share Quotient?
How many of your customers are mentioning you on Social Media? How do your shares compare to your competitions? How and what is being shared about you and your competitors?
What do you need to do to create the engagement needed to increase your shares?
What is Your Feedback vs. Your Competitor’s?
Within your competitive community, are consumers saying positive or negative things about each company? Who stands out from the crowd? Who is the consumer “favorite”? Is your brand mentioned during Social Media discussions?
What are your Competitors talking about?
This is where it gets insightful. Using social data, you should create charts about the topics your competitors post about on social media. You want to understand what is important to your competitors and how others react to what they post.
Doing this will make it clear what their product strategy, their marketing strategy, their sales strategy, their customer service strategy, their employee advocacy program are, and so much more.
What Results are there by Product Type?
Use the social media data you gathered to determine how often consumers are talking about your brand in the context of specific products. Track the results and you will be able to determine the course of action you will need to take.
An example would be tracking which activities were preferred.
What Happens When You Track Words Associated By Products.
I love this tactic. Track how often specific, desirable attributes are associated with your brand vs. your competitors by mining word inclusion in consumers’ social media posts.
Results Matter, Measure Your Success
The steps outlined above all work together to help you build a cogent and effective Social Media Data analysis method which works for YOU. Smart analysts use social data to be the cartographer of their business category.
If you’re trying to figure out your brand positioning, content marketing, social media marketing, and PR approach, organizing and recording Social Media Data about your competitors will be incredibly valuable.
Understand Your Competitors
There are many ways to use Social Media Data to measure your competitor’s behavior, abilility, and success. We have focused on five methods you can use to get started. Happy data mining. What tools do you use to study your competition’s social media presence?
