Over the last few years Twitter has become one of the biggest social media platforms, with tens of millions of users from all over the world signing in and posting tweets every day. Because of this, Twitter is now a marketing hotspot for all kinds of businesses, whether big or small.
The Big Resource Pool
Like other mega social media networks, such as Facebook and Instagram, Twitter gives businesses access to that enormous database of users loaded with a wealth of potential customers to tap into. In other words, Twitter allows businesses to reach out to a larger market at a greater and more efficient speed, which can also save them a lot of time and money.
It is because of this wealth of marketing potential that so many businesses build and develop marketing strategies specifically designed for Twitter. They flock to the social media platform every day with new tweets, retweets, links, videos, and other online marketing and advertising content. Even hashtags, Twitter’s specialty, can be implemented as a marketing strategy!
As a business leader, there is a lot that you can do for your business on Twitter besides creating and sharing marketing content, finding and reaching out to potential customers, or promoting your business in general. You can also use the information you learn about your competitors to focus your Twitter marketing strategy.
Since almost all businesses now use Twitter as a form of marketing or as a crucial part of their social media marketing strategy, chances are your own business’s competitors are using Twitter too. Therefore, Twitter can be a good way to learn from—and overcome—your competitors in order to dominate your market on social media and successfully reach out to your target demographic. Here are four smart and successful way to learn from your competitors and use them to your advantage on Twitter.
Monitor the Competition
There are ways to monitor your competitors on Twitter which will help you build, develop, improve, and refine your own marketing strategy. Peeking into your competition this way will tell you …
- What their strengths and weaknesses are
- What kind of content they are sharing
- How they are reaching out to your demographic
If your business chooses to engage in content marketing to increase brand awareness on social media, then it is likely that your marketing team is concerned about your ranking and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for any relevant keywords in search queries, or SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Higher page-rankings in the Twitter search function means better and stronger online exposure, with the added bonus of it being a low cost in your business’s marketing budget.
Keywords are the Key
Needless to say, your competitors will also be fighting for these high rankings on the same, relevant keywords. Therefore, it is important to stay informed on your own content’s relative position in these keyword rankings.
In order to monitor these numbers, you can use specific keyword monitoring tools like SEMRush or BuzzSumo.
- These tools can help you search for the best and highest performing content associated with any selected keyword.
- They monitor your brand’s position in these keyword rankings.
SEMRush
This tool gives you access to your content’s positions in the past and compares it to how your content is currently doing. It also compares your ranking to your competitors’ contents’ past and current weekly positions.
BuzzSumo
This one lets users see the number of social shares that a particular piece of content has. This helps you stay informed on what content is experiencing success and what may not be working so well.
The more frequently that a piece of content is shared on social media, then the higher it will be ranked on Twitter search queries for certain relevant keywords. Through keyword monitoring, you have the ability to …
- Outrank your competitors on specific and important keywords
- Stay aware of any competing content
- Adjust your own Twitter content marketing strategy accordingly
Backlink Monitoring
The total number of backlinks — links to your content from sources outside of Twitter — is another factor that affects everyone’s search engine page-rankings. This is an important way of dispersing content that can demonstrate informational value. The more authoritative the source of the backlinks, the higher the chances are of the search engine treating the shared piece of content with greater importance.
Therefore, you should vigorously monitor the sources of your competitors’ backlinks in order to stay informed about the appeal of their businesses to those sources. There are several online tools that can help you do backlink monitoring, so you can choose one that best suits your business’s needs such as price range and demands.
- One highly recommended function for backlink monitoring software is the ability to compare your backlink sources with those of your competitors.
Alerts
In the event that you are too short on time to browse through all the different tools to check the status of your competition on Twitter, then you can let Twitter do it for you.
- Twitter gives you the option to set up alerts for any mentions of your competition on the social media platform.
- Alerts can monitor outside media sources or relevant industry blogs linked and shared on the site.
- This is a way to call ‘dibs’ on your competitions’ public-facing strategy.
It’s important to stay updated and informed on any kind of news that may affect your business as well as the industry’s landscape in general. Alert notifications can be refined any way you want, whether it be by source, region, language, or frequency.
Compile Private Lists
This is one of the easiest and quickest ways to directly sort through your Twitter network. By creating private lists, you can group messages together from users on your lists.
- Public lists – help you grab the attention of highly influential social media users you would like to add to your business’s professional network. They deliberately notify your users about their rankings on your list.
- Private lists – serve a much different purpose. Members and their rankings can only be seen by you.
Private lists offer a better alternative for analyzing your competition, since you may not necessarily want your competitive monitoring and marketing tactics to be public knowledge. When learning from your competitors on social media in order to outdo them, it pays to be a little sneaky.
To make a private list, just go to the Lists page of your business’s Twitter account and choose the ‘private’ option when you create a new list. Setting up private lists on Twitter will help you …
- Keep track of the tone and content your competitors are sending to your potential customers.
- Learn the general outline of your competitor’s public-facing strategy.
- Take note of their current online content development and social media marketing strategies and initiatives.
Search Streams
Monitoring your competitors’ content and success by setting up search streams on your Twitter dashboard can save you a lot of both time and money.
- It is an effective and efficient way to keep track of your competitions’ social media activity on Twitter without compiling lists or investing in a lot of tools (if you don’t currently have the time nor the resources for it).
- You can better engage in listening on social media when you set up a separate stream of all your competing businesses and brands (similar to the search list function on Twitter) to check what kind of content and messages these companies send out to their—and your—potential customers.
Let our team of skilled business marketing consulting professionals and our years of experience guide your company through the social media market that is so vast and ever-changing and easy for so many businesses to get lost in. Visit here to contact us today and learn more about our services.
