Scoping Out The Competition on Social Media
Not long ago, I wrote an article on what small businesses needed to do to prevent their competition from going to their social networking website and having the competition use that information to steal their clients.
It was amazing that I got responses back right away from people in the small business community around the country.
Many of them said that similar things had happened to them, and one of them even said they wished they had never put their business on a social networking site to begin with.
Wow, that's pretty heavy considering all the Internet advice that marketers are giving to small companies these days.
Over the last year I must've read 50 articles on why it is so important to market your business on social networking and social media websites.
Now I'm talking to some small time entrepreneurs who tell me they spent way too much time for not enough benefit, and very few new customers - to top it all off, they say that their competition is trying to "friend" their online friends and others that post comments on their social media site.
Okay so, obviously there is a lot of scoping out of the competition going on, and a lot of snooping around.
There are a lot of sneaky tactics being used, but that shouldn't surprise anyone.
Now then, if everyone else is using these tactics, what exactly are they doing, and if they are doing it to me, why am I not doing it to them? That's a good question, you may think that it is stooping to low to go and contact the customers of your competitors, or read what they say on the competition's social networking page.
Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but you can get quite a bit of intelligence in the marketplace by perusing what your competitions customers, vendors, and clients are talking about.
If they are going to post it for the world to see, my question to you might be; why aren't you looking at it? Now then, perhaps you are looking at your competition's webpages out of curiosity.
But what can you do to benefit from all that time your spending? Why not look to see if there are any negative complaints, if customers are complaining about how your competition is doing business, how do you know your customers aren't complaining too? Maybe they are complaining about you on your competition's website, if so, you should contact those people and fix the problem, you may be losing customers, ones that you could easily lure back with a simple apology or phone call.
Indeed, what I would like you to take from this article is that it does matter, you should be viewing these things, and you should act on information which can help you in business.
It was amazing that I got responses back right away from people in the small business community around the country.
Many of them said that similar things had happened to them, and one of them even said they wished they had never put their business on a social networking site to begin with.
Wow, that's pretty heavy considering all the Internet advice that marketers are giving to small companies these days.
Over the last year I must've read 50 articles on why it is so important to market your business on social networking and social media websites.
Now I'm talking to some small time entrepreneurs who tell me they spent way too much time for not enough benefit, and very few new customers - to top it all off, they say that their competition is trying to "friend" their online friends and others that post comments on their social media site.
Okay so, obviously there is a lot of scoping out of the competition going on, and a lot of snooping around.
There are a lot of sneaky tactics being used, but that shouldn't surprise anyone.
Now then, if everyone else is using these tactics, what exactly are they doing, and if they are doing it to me, why am I not doing it to them? That's a good question, you may think that it is stooping to low to go and contact the customers of your competitors, or read what they say on the competition's social networking page.
Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but you can get quite a bit of intelligence in the marketplace by perusing what your competitions customers, vendors, and clients are talking about.
If they are going to post it for the world to see, my question to you might be; why aren't you looking at it? Now then, perhaps you are looking at your competition's webpages out of curiosity.
But what can you do to benefit from all that time your spending? Why not look to see if there are any negative complaints, if customers are complaining about how your competition is doing business, how do you know your customers aren't complaining too? Maybe they are complaining about you on your competition's website, if so, you should contact those people and fix the problem, you may be losing customers, ones that you could easily lure back with a simple apology or phone call.
Indeed, what I would like you to take from this article is that it does matter, you should be viewing these things, and you should act on information which can help you in business.