Have you heard of the app, Perch? It’s an app for small businesses that delivers a live, personalized stream of social media and promotion activity for businesses in the neighborhood. You choose your competitors and keep up with their content on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Google+, Instagram, Foursquare, Groupon, and Living Social. Everything is in one place!
When you add posts on your social media accounts, how do you come up with your content? Is it catered specifically toward the social media you are using? Or maybe you have your own content to post across the board, but tie it specifically to the appropriate social media accounts? Or maybe you look at your competitors for ideas?
If you do look at what kind of content competitors are posting, you know it can be quite time consuming to keep up with, especially if you are in a popular market. You may find a lot of feed beneficial, or some that is a waste of time to look through.
Not sure who your competitors are? Perch will help you find them! Once you download the app and login, you then have the option to search for competitors. You can type in keywords your target audience would search for when looking for the products or services you offer. For example, NEXTFLY used “website design” and “SEO” (Search Engine Optimization). Next you can select a location. (Don’t be afraid to broaden your location search outside of your city, for other cities, where your market product is hot.) Your search will then bring up a list of companies that you can chose to “watch”.
As these companies put content on their social media platforms, Perch will alert you of any new posts. Viewing these posts will give you ideas that you can post on your social media. Or this is also a good way to keep an eye on the post to see what type of engagement it is getting from its followers. You can use it as a guide to track what type of posts people most likely engage in, for example: quotes, blogs, articles, news, or pictures.
Every company you watch, including your own, includes data information displayed for everyone to view. This information indicates how often customers have liked or favorited your Facebook and Twitter messages over the past two weeks. It also tracks the number of social posts, promotions, reviews, and photos for your business over the past two weeks. This information has led me to discover that within the past two weeks a company we currently watch has posted 10 social media posts that 28 people engaged in, not bad! Another company we watch had 14 social media posts within the past two weeks and during that time 6 people engaged in the content. These statistics really help put in to perspective how well your content is getting to your followers.
Every week Perch will email you a “Weekly Watchlist Digest” and a “Weekly Performance Report”. The Weekly Watchlist Digest allows you to view in one email the posts you added that week, as well as the posts from the companies on your watch list added. Great way to compare your content with your competitors! The Weekly Performance Report focuses more on your business and its audience, performance, engagement, and reviews. Their are also great tips in this email for growing your audience and learning how to get your followers to engage in your content.
If you are looking for ways to broaden your social media, I would highly recommend using Perch! Let us know what you think!