The ancient Greek aphorism ‘Know Thyself’ needs a small addition to make it more relevant to social marketing—‘Know Thyself and Thy Competitors’ Strategies’. The good, or bad depending on your perspective, about social marketing is that it’s impossible to hide a successful strategy.
Anybody with a basic understanding of social marketing strategies can, at a glance, identify the strategies and tactics in use on a social media page or profile. So, the next time you find yourself short of ideas, just check out the social pages of your competitors for a quick and thorough learning experience.
Frequency of Posting
How frequently do new posts land upon the pages of your competitors? You may notice that the combination of frequent posts and intelligent use of ‘buy likes’ and ‘buy followers’ packages contribute to a busy and buzzing feel to your competitors’ brands.
So, just take a leaf out of their books and start posting more often. Of course, you will have to come up with interesting content but that should not be a difficult experience if you keep your eyes and ears open to new ideas at all times.
Keyword Research and Usage
Stuffing keywords into each and every message, update, meme, or video description you post can seem a bit sad and desperate to your audience. Do you really want to come across as somebody who treats the audience as a bunch of fools?
Check out pages of your more-successful competitors to gain an understanding of how they research and use keywords in their content. You will notice that those with a huge following are very skilled at creating content that makes use of relevant keywords seem natural and inevitable.
ClickBait—To Do or Not To Do
At first glance, a clickbait headline or a linkbait post may seem like a wonderful idea. However, this is a delicate exercise that needs to be done with a lot of care. Get it wrong and you may end up antagonising a large section of your followers.
Clickbait headlines are like funny pickup lines, it’s all fine provided the exaggeration is within limits. A post that makes the audience regret clicking on the link is not a good example of clickbait.
Instead of risking your goodwill, you can check out the pages of your competitors to understand audience reactions to their attempts at clickbait postings. You can learn from their mistakes, and successes as well, and decide to include such tactics into your social strategy.
