How to Steal Your Competitor’s Fans on Facebook
While it’s contentious, it’s no secret that one major element of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) is “competitive intelligence”, which somewhat euphemistically refers to seeing what competitors are doing and copying it.
I’m not an advocate of the direct copy approach that’s so prevalent in the industry, mainly because I think it’s hard to rank higher than something that’s already established by slavishly copying their strategy. There are also ethical and legal issues to consider, and the fact that many PPC companies have a dim few of tactics such as trademark bidding.
But when it comes to Facebook, not only is the ethical line blurred, but the practice is actively encouraged in the way that ads are set up. Whereas competitors can complain about aggressive or abusive PPC ad campaigns, stealing competitors fans is well within Facebook’s guidelines.
Shortcuts to Demographic Targeting
The usual way to approach a Facebook ad campaign is to create a broad, untargeted series of ads and then analyze the demographics of who clicks them once the statistics start to build. It’s a simple but effective technique, avoiding any presumptions about the expected demographic for a given business.
But if you have competitors who already have a fan following on Facebook (by the way, fans are called ‘likes’ now), it’s actually significantly easier to create ads that target only users who have ‘liked’ the competitor. You can still overlay geographic information if you so choose, but the competitor has effectively completed the demographic testing for you.
Is it unfair? I would argue that it’s absolutely unfair, but given the rising cost of PPC campaigns and growing popularity of Facebook, I would predict that targeting competitors’ fans directly will soon become the number one strategy in Facebook advertising.
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