Benchmark The Competition
Listening isn’t just for understanding who’s talking about you. Listening is also for understanding what’s happening around your business – and that means keeping track of what your competition is up to.
Setting up a topic profile in Radian6 to monitor your top competitors can reap lots of rewards. Just at a glance, you’ll get a sense of the volume of online buzz they’re receiving collectively, as well as some of the topics that their community – and perhaps even your customers – are discussing.
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Perhaps you’ll pick up news of a competitor’s acquisition from an inside source before it ever hits the mainstream news. Maybe you’ll hear that they’re rolling out a new product offering, but that their customers have questions about it’s pricing (which might inform decisions about how you price your own offerings). You might find opportunities to fill customers’ unmet needs by listening to competitive discussions. And you might even hear about what your competitor’s communities love about them, so you can understand what makes your company different, or where you can tweak your strategies to capture new attention.
An important metric that’s emerging in the social landscape is Share of Conversation, and Radian6 helps you understand and gauge that in a moment. Traditionally, the idea of “share of voice” was just about the number of mentions or hits related to your brand and in comparison with others. You can still track that today, with a simple competitive landscape snapshot:
But Share of Conversation takes it a step further, and shows you how often your brand (or your competitors brand) is mentioned relative to a topic of conversation you’d like to be associated with. So if you’re Tylenol, you might want to be part of the conversation and solution around back pain. And you might take a look at how Bayer Aspirin, Advil, Motrin and Aleve are faring, as well.
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In addition to the proportion of conversation that you and your competitors can claim, you’ll also be able to see the entire dialogue around those topics with a couple of clicks. You’ll hear what the community is saying, where their needs aren’t being met, what they’re appreciating about you or your competitors, and gain insight into what you could be doing more of, differently, or better in order to capture more of interest of the larger community.
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Now, you don’t just see how often you’re mentioned, but you can get a true sense of your impact and foothold in the industries, issues, and dialogues that are most important to the growth of your business. It’s a powerful way that Radian6 lets you see not just where you or the competiton are today, but where you need to be heading in the future, and inform tomorrow’s strategy and tactics to get there.
For an in-depth look at calculating your Share of Conversation, check out this post by our CEO, Marcel Lebrun.
Download the PDF version of Benchmarking the Competition with Radian6 here.
