Should Coke Follow Pepsi on Twitter?

Rupal Parekh posed some interesting questions with a Twitter-themed post on AdAge’s DigitalNEXT blog.  Among those questions was whether or not Bill Gates should return Eric Schmidt’s follow.

Doesn’t the notion of two direct competitors following one another seem ripe for an explosive post on reddit or Digg?  I can see such a thing becoming front-page news on the social news sites and then ending up as a mentionable on the morning news.  But Parekh brings up an interesting point.  (And it’s not interesting simply because he quoted me…)  What can we learn from following our competitors?

I see it as something not unlike trying to discern digital strategy from watching competitive creative executions in digital display advertising.  If all you ever see from a competitor is a bunch of ads linking to coupons and promotions, you might think that that’s how they’ve pigeonholed digital display advertising within the organization.  In that case, a sudden burst of brand awareness advertising would be unexpected.

I think a lot can be learned from following competitors.  If it’s a personal feed from a C-level executive at a competitor, you might learn a bit about where their head is at.  If it’s a brand feed, you might learn from the totality of the tweets posted what the overall strategy and role of Twitter might be.  Of course, these roles can change over time, but it’s important to note these things and see where your competitors have experimented and eventually settled on the right role for Twitter for that particular time and brand.

Of course, Twitter isn’t the only channel that can deliver insight on a competitor’s social media strategy.  You also need to look at what they’re doing with social networks like Facebook, sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube, community sites and more.  Not just to see how many “likes” or followers they have, but to see what they’re trying to do to build their business.  Do they run contests or sweepstakes?  Are they driving traffic to a brand site?  Are they trying to start one-on-one dialogues with customers?  Each of these represents a marked path in terms of a social media strategy, so it’s important to ask the right questions as you’re looking at a brand’s presence in social media.