You have finally mastered all there is to know about online marketing. You’ve studied all the techniques, and mastered creating spectacular posts. Now it’s time to make sure you stay on top of your game and at the forefront in your professional field. But how are you going to accomplish this? What can you do to remain an elite social media marketer? It’s time to go all 007 on your competition, and use a little espionage.

I may have blown out of proportion the underhandedness of what you need to be doing. I want you to follow your competitors’ Facebook pages. See what they are doing, and check out what sort of engagement they are getting. This shouldn’t be too hard since the majority of business pages are set as public. If you notice they are running a hugely successful innovative campaign, steal the idea and use it on your own page. I know you were taught stealing is wrong, but in this case it will make you a better marketer. No one called out The Lion King for ripping off Hamlet, or Star Wars using ideas from old samurai movies. Obviously you don’t want to straight up word for word use their campaign. Just take what you think made it successful, and make it your own. So it would be sort of like an homage. As a social media marketer for the YMCA, I’m going to want to check out other gyms and their Facebook pages. If I see that Uptown Fitness is getting a lot of engagement by showing video of the various classes they offer, then maybe I should be doing the same. By following their page I can keep up with trends and use any successful campaigns they are running to my advantage.

You can also follow basically any professional Facebook page regardless of business type. This will give you a large variety of marketing techniques, styles, and ideas. A good horror author doesn’t just read horror books. He reads anything and everything, and is able to take what he has learned from that romantic novel and apply that to his own stories. So when the three headed werewolf zombie mummy is about to attack Rebecca Johanson on the beach, it will be even more heart wrenching because she just got back with her husband after breaking off that torrid love affair with with the swarthy sea captain John Allouisus. Long story short, just because I’m promoting a gym, doesn’t mean I can’t use ideas from a movie theater’s Facebook page. If it works, it works.

If you get a chance to talk to fellow social media marketers, please take advantage of it. There are a lot of online professional communities out there, such as Linkedin. Use them to your advantage. You can easily bounce ideas off of each other, and discuss things that worked and things that failed. This is a powerful tool all professionals, regardless of field, should be using if they want to stay on top of their game.

Keep a watchful eye on other businesses’ Facebook pages. They can inspire you, and help your page grow in many different ways. Do you have anything you’d like to add on this subject? Does it bother you that The Lion King was written by Shakespeare? Do you think spying on your competition’s pages is nefarious? Let me know by leaving a comment below. Don’t forget to hit the share button below because gaining knowledge is the first step to wisdom; sharing it is the first step to humanity.