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Your rivals are the cheapest research you will ever run

Everything a competitor does on social media is public. So is everything you do. This book is about using the first fact well and surviving the second.

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01 The setting

Competing on social media means competing where everyone can see the working

Pinelli opens with a plain observation: you can see what your competition is up to, and it is only a few clicks away. Their posting rhythm, their prices, their replies to angry customers, their hashtags and their follower counts are all sitting in the open.

That is a genuine gift. It is also the reason the rest of the book keeps returning to conduct. The same window that lets you study a rival lets the rival study you, and lets every customer study both of you at once. The book says it directly: your competition is looking out for the same things, and some of them may already be analysing you.

One quick use of the open record is spotting who is faking it. A brand promoting to thousands of people that ends up with about ten likes and two comments is telling you something about its reach, whatever its follower count says.

02 Competitive analysis

Aim at what your rivals are worst at, not at what they post most

A social media competitive analysis compares your strengths and weaknesses against theirs. Pinelli is blunt that a beginner will find a rival's strengths outmatch their own, and says that is fine, because the target is not their best work.

The method narrows. Take the top five or ten keywords your buyers actually search, put them through Google Adwords Keyword Planner, and see who ranks organically. Follow those sites to their linked social profiles. Then use Facebook Audience Insights or Twitter Analytics to see which other brands your own audience already follows, because those are rivals too.

That list will be long, so cut it. The book says narrow to three to five brands you compete with closely, then record the same six things for each: which platforms, how many followers and how fast growing, who their top followers are, how often they post, their engagement rate, and which hashtags they use. Record the same six for yourself, and the comparison becomes a SWOT.

Your goal will eventually be to outmatch and outperform them, specifically in their weaknesses. Chapter 2, Survey the Competition

03 Two kinds of rival

Sort every competitor into one you talk to and one you only watch

This is the book's sharpest practical distinction, and it decides your behaviour toward every other company in your field. Both sit inside your industry. What separates them is who they are actually selling to: an indirect competitor, in her words, is a company inside your industry that is targeting different consumers.

With indirect competitors, Pinelli wants you collaborating. Audiences enjoy seeing brands team up, each side gets introduced to the other's followers, and knowledge sharing costs neither of you a customer. She also notes that bigger companies routinely refer the clients they cannot take on to smaller reputable businesses, so a relationship with a non-competing firm is a real competitive edge.

With direct competitors the advice is short: preferably do not engage, and stay away. You still gain from them, but through observation rather than contact. What they publish in public tells you the tone and the interests of a shared audience, which is the hardest thing to work out when you are starting.

Collaboration is a form of team work designed by competitors to each gain more benefits. Chapter 3, Build Collaborations

04 Social listening

Your rival's customers will tell you what to fix before you ship

Pinelli separates two things that look identical. Social monitoring collects the countable stuff: hashtags, industry trends, competitor mentions, brand mentions. Social listening reads the mood underneath it. Numbers cannot predict a mood, and a post with plenty of negative reaction can still go viral.

Listening is a two-step habit. First you monitor the platforms for mentions of your brand, your products, your competitors and your keywords. Then you analyse what you found and act on it, which might be as small as replying to a happy customer or as large as running a competition to pull attention away from a rival.

The clearest payoff in the book is averting a crisis. A competitor tries a new product, you watch the discussion, and you hear that people are displeased. You call your product team with a list of changes before your own similar launch goes ahead. The same trick runs constantly among the platforms themselves: a new app ships a distinctive feature and you can watch the older apps change theirs to stop users leaving.

05 Where the line falls

Answer an attack with evidence, never with the same attack

This is where the book draws its line between competing hard and competing badly. Some rivals decide that bad-mouthing the competition is the way to win people over, and sooner or later that will be pointed at you.

Pinelli's sequence is specific. Do not take revenge and bad-mouth them back, because it only adds fuel. If they are lying, refute the claim with evidence rather than calling them out directly, and a light, tongue-in-cheek reply often does more than a direct attack. Document every incident, dated, because a small number of cases end up needing it. Then consider extending the olive branch: tell them privately what you have recorded, explain that a court loss would be expensive, and offer to go separate ways.

Only after that does law enter it. Some lies are libel or slander, but she is clear you consult a lawyer first to find out whether the case is strong. Her related warning applies to your own customers too: never delete a legitimate critique, because third-party review sites exist and people will say publicly that you censored them.

In general, you want to be the competitor that plays the game fairly. No one likes a cheater, especially when they are found out. Chapter 7, Don't Be Antagonistic

06 Borrowing tactics

Copy what a rival's tactic proves, not the tactic itself

Pinelli treats a well-run competitor as a completed experiment. If a rival ahead of you has already found the lead magnet that works, a pop-up, a free ebook, a webinar or a guide, then they have paid the cost of testing and the result is sitting in public.

She is equally firm about the trap. Copying too much from competitors is one of the content mistakes she lists by name. Just because a tactic works for them does not mean it will work for you, and no matter how similar two businesses look there will always be key differences. What you take is the principle, and then you test it against your own circumstances.

Her framing of the relationship is not defensive. She notes that Bill Gates treated competition as something that kept his company sharp, and that ignorance about rivals is a fatal mistake in business rather than a neutral one.

The main goal for anyone with a business should be to do things better than the competition. And in your industry, it's ideal if you know the competition better than you know yourself. Chapter 9, Build a Following

07 The unclaimed ground

Almost nobody is actually customer-centred, and that is the opening

The book's last competitive idea is the one most businesses walk past. Citing Yohn in 2018, Pinelli reports that only around fourteen per cent of companies say they focus on customer centricity, and only around eleven per cent of their customers agree that they do.

She asks the obvious question of that pair of numbers: are you seeing the golden opportunity here. Most brands are product-focused or sales-driven, often because commission structures reward selling rather than serving. Meanwhile audiences have grown tired enough of advertising that the book gives the exhaustion a name, banner blindness.

So the differentiator is not the claim, which is cheap and which your rivals are making too. It is the action behind it. Her closing warning on this is the whole point: even if the competition is making the same claims, make sure you are taking action on those claims, and the audience will follow.

08 The whole book

You win by studying rivals closely and treating them decently

Ten chapters run one argument. The competition is your best and cheapest source of information, and the way you behave toward them in public is itself a competitive asset. Three habits carry it.

Ask one question of anything you are about to post about a competitor: if they screenshot this and show it to my customers, does it help me? That single test covers most of what this book teaches.

Adapted from How to Win Against Your Competitors in the Social Media Age
Sheryl Pinelli  ·  © 2023 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services  ·  28 cited sources in the source edition