Should You Follow Your Competitors Openly Or Secretly On Facebook?

A lot of small companies, or companies who have just started using Facebook, don’t know whether to follow their competitors or not. The truth is that pretty much all businesses (excluding huge international corporations and brands like American Express, Nike and Coca-Cola) will benefit from following their competitors and similar businesses local to them on Facebook.

In fact, the question companies should be asking themselves is “how should we be following our competitors?” Is it best to follow your competitors secretly, looking for any edge that you can gain over them, or is it best to follow your competitors openly, providing you with the opportunity to network and work in partnership with them?

The answer to that question completely depends on the way you want to run your business, but to help you decide, here are the pros and cons to each method, and how to go about doing them.

Openly

Following another company on Facebook is easy: all you have to do is like their page as either yourself, or your company. The main disadvantage to this is that if your competitor doesn’t want you to follow them, they can just remove you as a liker, or even ban you permanently. This is unlikely to happen: there is no search tool to find specific likers, page administrators just have to scroll through, which is a bit time-consuming if they have a lot of likes. If you are unfortunate enough for this to happen to you, then think about following them secretly.

The other serious disadvantage with this method is that your competitor’s posts may be hard to monitor as they’ll just become part of your cluttered news feed. In fact, if your just looking to monitor your competitor, its probably easier just to go on their page whenever you want without necessarily having to like it.

Of course, an open and honest relationship with your competitors can be very beneficial. At its most basic, liking another business can persuade them to like you back, helping to build your fanbase. Even if a business is a competitor, you may be able to work alongside them without treading on each other’s toes. There may also be an opportunity to work with a potential rival, helping each other out with perceived weaknesses in your respective companies or recommending your rival to customers that you can’t necessarily cater for yourself.

If you are following a larger company, or one with more experience on Facebook, why not look through the posts they receive from fans and customers. Facebook can be a powerful tool for sentiment analysis, as conversations are contained in one easy-to-read thread. Learn about how you should interact with customers and fans on Facebook by monitoring brand pages with more experience than you.

Secretly

If you intend to follow a rival company secretly, there are two options: the easy option is to follow their page from a personal account; the difficult option, but perhaps the more rewarding one, is to add their page to an interests list.

Only personal accounts can create interests lists, which allow users to follow pages privately without the page administrators knowing – just like Twitter lists. To add a competitor’s page to a list, or to start creating one from scratch, click on the options cog beside their “Like” and “Message” buttons. From the drop-down menu click “Add to Interests List”. In the pop-up that appears, you can name your list and search for other competitors to add to it.



So, say you create a list entitled “Competitors”, with all your main rivals on it, you will be able to see all their posts in one stream, making it easier to monitor exactly what they are all doing. The “Manage list” button on the top right of the list page gives you even more control over what you see in the feed. From there, you can rename the list, add or remove pages and even control what sort of updates you see in the stream.

You can learn a lot about a company from the updates they post: from pictures taken at the company offices you can learn about their workplace and their employees; they will post updates and future projects on their Facebook page, providing you with valuable information; work out what sort of posts get the most interaction and imitate your rivals best practices.

The most underhand practice that occurs between rivals on Facebook is customer stealing. Earlier I said that by monitoring the sentiments of your competitor’s customers you could learn how to run your own business on Facebook, the other possibility is that you could advertise to your rival’s disgruntled customers with Facebook’s targeted advertising. Use “Precise Interests” to narrow your crosshairs if you are planning to attract customers from a larger company.

If you are trying to poach customers from a local rival, edit the text in your advert to show that you can offer what they are lacking. For example, if a rival club in your city has late night licencing problems, advertise that your club can stay open until the early morning.

Conclusions

As I said at the start of this article, it is completely up to you how you portray yourself online. Being open with your competitors can deny you a cutting edge, but being secretive could gain you a reputation for foul play.

Whichever path you choose, it is of the upmost importance that you don’t get obsessed with monitoring your rivals online. Only follow your competitors to get inspiration: you need to post your own original content and come up with your own ideas concerning how you want to use Facebook to promote your brand. Don’t just be a follower, be a leader as well.

Do you follow your competitors openly or secretly on Facebook?

Let us know on Twitter, on Facebook, or leave your comments below.


Will Sigsworth

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