As the war for talent heats up, an increasing number of companies are turning to social recruiting.

This means more competition for social recruiters everywhere.

More competition for you!

Do you know what your competitors are Tweeting?

If not, then it’s time to find out!

Your rivals are a prime source of information.

Inspecting your competitors on social media helps you better understand your industry and gives you valuable insight into the behavior and interests of the audiences that you are targeting.

Their most popular content can inform your future content and their failures can steer you clear of social media disaster.

In this article, you’ll learn how to analyze your competitor's social media strategy to ensure that you’re always one step ahead.

1. Harness The Power Of The Spreadsheet

Your first step in total social media domination is to create... A spreadsheet!

If you are one of those amazingly organized people who ALWAYS makes a spreadsheet then please feel free to skip to step 2.

Before you start scrolling through your adversaries’ Instagram accounts, make a simple spreadsheet that lists a few of your main competitors, which social networks they are active on and links to their accounts.

This way you can approach your investigation in an organized, effective manner.

2. Gather Facebook Intel

Facebook makes it really, really easy to stalk your competitors.

Facebook’s Pages to Watch feature allows you to create a list of business Pages that you want to monitor and then gives you their data.

Seriously.

You can see their Page Like progress, how many posts they’ve shared, and what their engagement was like this week.

You can even go in and look at each competitor’s top posts to see what kind of content performs well for them.

Here’s how to get started with Facebook Pages to Watch.

Use the intel you gather to create goals for your own Facebook Page, such as how often to post and to inform what content you choose to create in the future.

Here are a few more things to consider when Facebook stalking your competition:

• How many followers do they have?

• What topics are they posting about?

• Are they posting mostly internal content or curated content?

• What kind of language are they using and what kind of language do their followers use?

• How often do they post?

• How many likes/comments/shares do they get per post?

• Do they post jobs to their timeline or have a Career Site on their Facebook Page?

And, if you’re like me, you’ll also want to add your findings to your social recruiting spying spreadsheet!

Follow Them On Twitter

Twitter is one of the most popular social networks for businesses.

Twitter is also an excellent place to find information about your competition because so much of Twitter data is public

The first step to accessing this data is to simply follow your competitors.

But this is seriously un-sneaky!

No honorable spy would out them self so readily.

The sneaky way to follow your competition on Twitter is to add them to a private Twitter list.

To create a private list on Twitter select “List” from the “Profile and Settings” dropdown, and then click on “Create new list.”

Name your list, set it to private, and start adding your competitors Twitter accounts!

Within minutes, you’ll have a stream of relevant information to learn from.

You can also use free tools to get even more information about your competitors.

• Simply Measured will provide you with a free Twitter follower report

  to help you analyze their demographic and interest data.

• Twitter Counter lets you monitor your Tweet volume and follower growth against two of your competitors.

• Followerwonk lets you analyze any profile's followers for free enabling you to build a comprehensive picture of your competitor's Twitter presence.

Here are a few questions that you’ll want to answer about your rivals’ Twitter presence:

• How many followers do they have? And how influential are those followers?

• What do they tweet about?

• How many favorites/replies/retweets do they average per post?

• What kind of content gets them the most engagement?

• Have they created lists? If so, what lists have they made and who’s on them?

• What hashtags do they use most?

• Do they run or participate in any Twitter chats?

• Do they use Twitter ads?

Find the answers and add them to your list!

Blogs Are The Gateway To The Sole

Companies are beginning to catch on to the fact that recruiting should be treated like marketing. And marketers everywhere are switching over to inbound/content marketing.

One of the pillars of content marketing is the blog.

Blogs allow companies to write in depth pieces that highlight their employment brand and connect with job seekers on a deeper level than the short form content shared on social networks.

If you want to understand your competitor's message, their values, and their mission then their blog is your best resource.

Their blog can also give you a deeper insight into their audience than studying their social networks.

Read the comments left on your competitions’ blog posts to see how their audience is responding to their message.

Check the amount of social shares each blog post receives to learn their most popular topics.

Find out if they use guest bloggers and if so who, then consider reaching out to those bloggers yourself.

Tying It All Together

Facebook, Twitter, and blog posts are my favorite sources for competitor analysis.

If your competition is focused on other social recruiting channels, then you’ll want to monitor those as well.

Here are 37 excellent tools to help you spy on your competitors across all of their different social networks!

Once you feel satisfied with the information you’ve gathered, revisit your list and start piecing it all together.

You’ll soon see what’s working for your competitors and what is failing horribly!

You’ll also learn where your own social recruiting strategy is ahead of the curve and where you need to pick up your game.

Either way, you now have the information that you need to win the war for social recruitment domination and crush your opponents!