Should you follow your competitors on social media?

The usual answer is yes, obviously, how else would you know what they are doing.

I think the usual answer is wrong, and not for the reason people expect.

The real cost is not the follow

Yes, following them gives them a follower and feeds their engagement slightly. This is the reason people usually cite and it is the least important one.

The actual cost is what daily exposure does to your head.

If a competitor is in your main feed, you read their marketing every day. Every day, a polished statement about how they see the world, what problems matter, what the right way to think about the category is.

Marketing works. That is what it is for. And it works on you too, and you have no immunity just because you know it is marketing.

What it does to you, specifically

Six months of ambient competitor marketing and something has quietly shifted.

You start using their vocabulary in your own copy, because it is the language you have been swimming in. You start caring about the problems they say are important, which are the problems their product happens to solve. You start feeling behind on things you had deliberately decided not to build.

And the strange, specific point of view that made your product worth choosing gets slowly sanded down into a slightly worse version of theirs, and nobody ever made a decision to do that.

This is not paranoia. It is just how exposure works. It works on your customers, which is why you do marketing at all. It is not going to skip you out of professional courtesy.

The list, not the feed

So do not follow them. Put them on a private list instead.

The difference is that a list is deliberate. You go to it when you have a reason to, once a week, with a specific question in mind. You read with your defences up, because you know what you are doing.

The feed is ambient. It arrives while you are half-awake with a coffee and it goes in unexamined, which is exactly the state in which marketing is most effective.

Same information. Completely different relationship to it.

What to look for when you do check

Not the posts themselves. Almost all of them are nothing.

The drift. Are they describing themselves the same way they were three months ago? Has the buyer they are addressing changed? Are they using new words?

That is the signal, and you can only see it by checking in periodically and comparing, not by reading every post as it arrives. Ironically, the daily follower is worse at noticing the drift than the weekly checker, because the change is gradual and they were there for all of it.

Stand further back. See more.