These notifications help you to stay on top of how you\u2019re performing on your social media accounts. But social media alerts aren\u2019t just for tracking your own social media presence. Let\u2019s break down why you should set up alerts on your competition.<\/p>\n
Why You Should Use Social Media Alerts<\/h2>\n1. Keep an eye on your competition.<\/h3>\n
When you set up social media alerts on your competitors, you get real-time updates on your market. Receiving social media alerts can help you stay on top of what\u2019s happening in your industry and see where your competitors stand in capturing your audience\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n
Through Rival IQ, you can set alerts to see when your competitors are seeing changes in their social media presence. These changes can give you insight into their overall strategies. Say Caribou Coffee<\/a> was one of your biggest competitors. By setting up alerts on their social media presence, you\u2019d keep track of their activity, like when they change their Instagram bio.<\/p>\n A change in an Instagram bio can signal a shift in marketing strategy. In this case, Caribou\u2019s changing of their bio link alerts you to a new partnership between Caribou and Bulletproof. Staying updated on your competitors\u2019 marketing strategy, such as the development of a new collaboration, can help you remain at the top of your industry. You always want to know what your competitors are up to so you can stay two steps ahead. If Caribou is promoting a partnership, you may want to counter with new news of your own to keep the attention on your brand.<\/p>\n Your competitors may not be on your team, but that doesn\u2019t mean they can\u2019t help you. By setting up alerts on their social media accounts, you can follow along to see what\u2019s working for them and what isn\u2019t. These alerts give you invaluable industry insight. You can see how their posts resonate with online users interested in your market. From there, you can take the learnings from their strategy and implement them into your own.<\/p>\n If your competitor were Dutch Bros<\/a>, you would want to set up alerts on them to see how their strategy is working. You\u2019ll receive alerts for high spikes in their engagement, as well as alerts for specific posts that garnered a lot of attention. These breakout posts can tell you what types of posts are doing well on certain social media platforms and within your industry.<\/p>\n The above breakout post was a video showcasing one of the brand\u2019s top drinks of 2022, the Flap Jack Mocha. As a competitor, you might try to gather learnings about why this post succeeded. You might consider implementing more videos into your social media marketing strategy to test if videos are more successful than still images. Or you might want to start creating more posts showcasing specific favorite drinks at your own store. The learnings you take from one breakout post can help you optimize your own greater social media marketing strategy.<\/p>\n For many small businesses, the CEO is also the social media manager and therefore sees firsthand when there\u2019s a need to increase the social media marketing budget. But for mid-tier or enterprise businesses, the social media manager and CEO are two distinct roles.<\/p>\n Depending on the company’s size, the social media manager may have to report to multiple executives. They may also have people reporting to them. With this level of disconnect, the social media manager must keep higher-ups up to date on their budget needs. If they are not transparent regarding their social media strategy with their higher-ups, they may not see an increase in the resources needed to succeed.<\/p>\n Perhaps you have a makeup company you\u2019re building and want to keep track of some large makeup brand competitors, like NYX Cosmetics<\/a>. You could set up alerts to see when NYX is boosting their posts.<\/p>\n Throughout January 2023, the company boosted three videos on Facebook. Of those three, two received an engagement rate of over 0.15%, resulting in over 5.8K engagements for each post. According to our 2023 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report<\/a>, health and beauty brands scored a median engagement rate of 0.028% on Facebook. These boosted posts garnered an increase of over 436% from the median rate.<\/p>\n If you wanted to try to prove to your executives that you needed an increase in budget for your social media strategy, you might want to point to those posts as proof that running boosted posts is needed in your overall strategy and, therefore, budget.<\/p>\n Using Rival IQ, you could also use the competitive analysis<\/a> tool to see how NYX typically performs on Facebook to demonstrate how using boosted posts helped them gain much higher engagement. In January, NYX received an overall engagement rate of 0.03%, over 80% less than the engagement rate for these two boosted posts.<\/p>\n There are several social listening tools on the market that can help you keep track of your competitors. You can easily set up free alerts on Google. However, Google Alerts<\/a> cannot be used for social media. When you plug in a keyword on Google Alerts, you\u2019ll receive notifications from Google when that keyword is mentioned on the web, not on social media.<\/p>\n Talkwalker<\/a> allows you to set up alerts for free to keep an eye on your and your competitors\u2019 mentions in tweets, blogs, forums, and articles. While Critical Mention<\/a> does not offer a free alert system, you can use their packages to set up keyword-specific alerts for TV, radio, articles, podcasts, and social media. Another option is Mention<\/a>, which has a free trial and will let you set up alerts for social media and the web in general.<\/p>\n As a social listening tool and a social analytics tool, you can use Rival IQ to set up alerts and keep track of your and your competitors\u2019 mentions. But Rival IQ goes beyond mentions. We\u2019ll tell you about changes to your competitors\u2019 bios, their engagement rate jumps, their breakout posts, their boosted posts, their follower growth spikes, and even when they make language changes to their website.<\/p>\n\n![\"Rival](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image4-700x151.jpg\")
<\/p>\n2. Learn from what\u2019s working.<\/h3>\n
![\"Dutch](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image3-700x117.jpg\")
<\/p>\n3. Advocate for your own budget.<\/h3>\n
![\"Social](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image6-700x290.png\")
<\/p>\nHow Do You Set Social Media Alerts?<\/h2>\n
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![\"Rival](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image5-700x308.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Pick](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image1-700x518.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Enter](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/image2-700x145.png\")
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