Trying to target your competitor's fans might not be the best route to take with buying likes/running sweepstakes/inactive accounts in mind. The better route would be to build a persona (using FB custom audiences tool) for your competitor and advertising to that persona.
If the persona you build for your competitor is different than the one you build for your company, evaluate why they're different and if it's still a good idea to try and acquire their fans.
On the topic of building a persona, it's immensely beneficial to create a "anti-persona" and use that custom audience as an exclusion in your targeting. With an anti-persona, you're considering who your product/service is NOT for, as this gives a greater context as to WHY it is attractive to those intended.
If there is a defining factor between your company and your competitor's - that causes some people to always choose the competitor over you - you'd want to include that in another anti-persona custom audience as well.
Twitter has already conducted tests, measuring the sales lift attributed to Twitter exposures and interactions for 35 brands. They concluded:
Engagement drives greater in-store sales. Users who engaged with a brand’s Promoted Tweets spent 12% more than a statistically identical control group. Exposures alone saw a 2% lift in sales.
Brands’ organic Tweets drive sales. Users exposed to a brand’s organic Tweets bought more from that brand than those who were not exposed, producing an 8 percent average sales lift. This lift was nearly 3x greater among users who saw 5 or more organic Tweets.
Followers who see Promoted Tweets buy more. Followers who are exposed to Promoted Tweets purchased 29 percent more from that brand than followers reached by organic Tweets alone.
We believe that this partnership could help take your brand’s social strategy to the next level. How?
Example: ‘Does tailored content increase sales?’
1. First conduct analysis to determine the different interest areas of your existing customer base
2. Then segment these groups and target them on Twitter using their recently announced Custom Audiences product.
3. Publish tailored content to your custom audiences. For example an auto brand might have one set of customers who are interested in sports cars and another set who are in the market for people carriers; they could target the two groups separately without the risk of exposing them to content that would put them off.
4. Using Datalogix we can then measure the offline spend of users who see tailored content and compare it to a control group who see all of your content.
5. Finally, we can determine if the extra time and money spent delivering tailored content yields an ROI.
It’s easy to get carried away with chasing likes, follows and shares but do brands know the specific effect that different actions and exposures have on their bottom line? We believe that social platforms are at their most effective when they are used in this way to help meet business objectives.
If you want to know more about Twitter and Datalogix talk to TBG; or follow us on Twitter, or Tumblr to stay up to date on all things social.