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How To Get Your Competitors' Social Followers
Social media is a great way to share ideas, communicate with customers, get involved in discussions and promote yourself and your knowledge. Of course, it’s more effective if you have the right followers.
That’s an important point that you should always keep in mind. Having the right followers is more important than having the most followers. Many people aim to have large numbers of followers, but finding the right followers is far more effective. After all, if you have 10,000 people listening to your message, but none of them will ever visit your website, buy your products or services or interact with you in any way, you might be better off changing your strategy. Having 100 dedicated followers who want to hear from you is probably more effective.
Finding the Right Followers
It’s much more important to acquire targeted followers. Targeted followers are people who are interested in what you have to say. These are the people who will reply or comment on your social media posts. They’ll visit your blog. They’ll subscribe to your newsletter. They’ll become customers. These are the people that you want to engage with.
So how do you find these people? One good way is to look at your competition.
Looking at your Competition’s Followers
Who is your competition following? Who are they interacting with? These might just be the people who you want to interact with as well.
As an example, take a look at Twitter. You can easily look at the Twitter profiles of your competitors and see who they follow and who they interact with. You can then use this information to decide who you should follow and interact with as well. This will earn you some engaged followers who will likely be more than happy to converse with you.
Of course, don’t just blindly follow or send messages to everyone that a competitor follows. Follow strategically and engage people when it makes sense. Spamming someone with comments will only serve to annoy them. Responding to their comments and questions with thoughtful and interesting answers will help you grow your presence online.
Follow Trends
You’ll also want to utilize hashtags and trends in order to find people to communicate with. People who are discussing issues that are relevant to you and your industry will be much better people to follow and reply to than random strangers. They will instantly be more interested in what you have to say and be much more likely to turn into dedicated followers.
Offer Advice to Their Customers
Another step that you can take is to look who is discussing your competition online and consider communicating with those people. For example, if you see a Twitter user who says “I wish ABC Company offered Blue Widgets instead of just Green Widgets” and ABC Company is your competition, you may wish to engage with this person. This is especially true if you offer the blue widgets that this person is looking for. Remember to be respectful and polite when doing so however. You don’t want to burst into an existing conversation with discussion about your brand. However, if you manage to speak with this user appropriately and answer his or her questions, you could earn yourself a new follower and possibly even a new customer.Study your Competition
It helps to study your competition and see what they are doing well. They may be posting at specific times or on specific topics and doing so could be the reason that they are gaining followers. Study their activities and see when they are posting, what they are posting about and who they are engaging. You may want to consider emulating this activity in order to attract some of their followers.
For more information about how social media and influencer marketing can help you grow your business, please reach out to me by email at info@socialpulsemarketing.com and I'll be happy to help.
Steven Tulman is the CEO of Social Pulse Marketing Inc., a leading influencer marketing agency. He is a social media marketing and sales expert, and an entrepreneur with a passion for helping companies grow through effective online marketing strategies, improved sales performance, and overall customer experience.