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Social Media Monitoring Tools To Size Up Your Competition - Performing a competitive analysis should be an essential piece of your company’s strategic plan.
Gaining this information can help you to better understand your company’s strengths and weaknesses, more accurately forecast the returns of future strategies, and achieve a competitive advantage going forward.
Engaging a company to prepare a competitive analysis can be a very large expense for a small business to absorb. Fortunately, social media provides a much more affordable outlet for gaining a leg up on your competition.
Outlined below are several ways that social media monitoring tools can help your business to size up the competition and gain an edge above the rest:
1. Monitor mentions of your brand (both good and bad) anywhere on the web
With an infinite number of online conversations happening on the Internet at any given time, it would be impossible to be able to detect all of the mentions of your brand on your own.
By using social media monitoring tools, you can setup alerts based on keywords to notify you when your company has been mentioned in an online conversation. This is a very helpful tool in gauging the public’s perception of your brand.
2. Learn what the public thinks of your competitors
You can also use these monitoring tools to scan online conversations about your competitors. What are people saying about your competition’s new products or services?
What could they improve upon? Are they anticipating bringing a new product to the market in the near future?
Most importantly, how does the public think your brand compares to the competition? Having access to this powerful information could be a game changer for your company.
3. Gain information to better position your brand’s content marketing efforts
Using Internet monitoring tools can help your business to gain an understanding of which of your competition’s blog posts have generated the most buzz among its fan base and which posts simply did not.
In summary, social media monitoring tools can provide an affordable solution for gauging how your brand and the competition’s is perceived by your target customer base.
Having access to this valuable knowledge can help your business to tweak its strategy to help ensure the best results.
When was the last time your company performed a competitor analysis? How has your brand benefiting from this information?
See Also: Social Media Marketing: Using Twitter’s New ‘Vine’ Video App