In the event that someone looked at the browser history, how various times would your competitors’ social media profiles show up under the “Recently Visited” list? Probably more than you’d care to declare.

We all creep the competition’s social media single profiles; after all, we wish to see what we up against. But there is a much better method to understand how the brand compares to the competition and use this data to share with your business approach: social media competitive cleverness.

At this very instant, your customers—and your competitors’ customers—are having online interactions about their experiences, complications, perceptions, and desires. These kinds of conversations provide a riches of honest, real-time, unfiltered feedback that directly influences your bottom line. 

Socially-driven competitive intelligence captures these types of conversations, focused both on your brand and the competition, helping you collect insights which could optimize the customers’ activities throughout all their entire journey with the brand. It also floods in the gaps kept by more traditional competitive intelligence approaches, like syndicated sales data and ad-hoc marketing research.

Here’s why socially-driven competitive intelligence calls for the utility of interpersonal media to a fresh level—and why it should be part of the way your business forms its market strategy.

This Lets You Act about Real-Time Info :
Traditional competitive intelligence methods undoubtedly give valuable information. Unfortunately, they will fall short with regards to aiding brands to understand rapid changes in the market or perhaps in customer opinion, which in turn are often represented simply by conversations taking place on the web at any given minute. Without socially-driven competitive intellect, brands will miss out on valuable real-time ideas, such as an immediate shift in share of voice, a significant issue in manufacturing or QA procedure, or a market push that needs to end up being addressed. 

Armed with current social data, companies happen to be empowered to be even more nimble with their approach and take an active (rather than reactive) strategy to their digital occurrence.

It Provides Answers to Questions You Didn’t Know to Ask : 
By simply integrating social media with your regular comp intel mix, critical info on the opponents is “pushed” for you, instead of you having to “pull” the data from the customer (as with focus groups or surveys). You are going to get insight on subject areas you never thought to explore, and you’ll become better armed to research areas that drive revenue. 

Let’s say that a global leader in food with 500 restaurants and 320 million meals each month, nabbed its position as a market innovator by staying over foodstuff trends. The company prioritized tracking not only their direct opponents but the best 25 restaurants throughout the world through social media as well. By simply looking outside the quick market, this company remains in front of market trends, constantly refining and updating it is menus to match innovating tastes. 

The business can usually validate its assumptions through surveys or focus teams and test menu products in a few initial locations; however, asking buyers to predict what’s the next kale or brussel sprout isn’t the best way to gather marketplace intelligence. In cases like this, the preferred guess is to listen to social conversation. 

It Enables You to Scale The Competitive Intelligence Software: You can think of interactions happening online as a single big focus group. The sheer volume of interpersonal conversations relevant to the brand or industry offers you to be able to peek into the purchase experience in the way that a traditional focus group could, but over a much larger sized scale, and much even more quickly.

With the correct competitive benchmarking technology working in the background, immediately categorizing and scoring sociable conversations, you’re able to free up valuable solutions to give attention to understanding buyers across their brand. 

A large number of brands are skilled in using social media to market products, build community, boost online engagement, and listen to conversations relevant to their organization, but not many understand how to harness the competitive intel made available through sociable media in order to make strategic business decisions. 

Social media benchmarking is not simply useful for a brand’s social media crew; it’s strongly related to the slumber of marketing, sales, customer satisfaction, and product teams. With 74% of consumers depending on internet sites to guide purchases, understanding how the brand compares to the competition online, and what varieties of conversations happen to be taking place around the competitors, industry, and item is essential to creating exceptional customer experiences.

Daniel Clark is a blogger and works with Clickmatix, a social media marketing agency helping clients achieve their business goals through the help of the best social media marketing company. Follow him on twitter at @DanielClark123.