What to Post When a Big Competitor Opens Nearby
When a chain opens down the road, the instinct is to post a comparison, a bit of shade, or a plea to support local — and all three quietly hand them the advantage. Here's what to post instead during the fortnight their opening buys them everyone's attention.
Dave Smith
# What to Post When a Big Competitor Opens Nearby
Picture the Tuesday morning you find out.
Maybe it's the hoarding going up on the empty unit two doors down, with a logo you last saw on a retail park. Maybe a customer mentions it whilst you're wrapping their order, a bit too casually, in that way people do when they think they might be dropping bad news. Maybe it's a sponsored post landing in your own feed, targeted at your own postcode: *Now open in your area. Opening week offers on everything.*
However it arrives, the reaction is fairly universal. A slow drop in the stomach, followed by a very specific kind of panic that has you opening your own business page for the first time in a fortnight and discovering that the most recent thing on it is a bank holiday graphic.
So what do you actually post now?
The first instinct is the wrong one
Almost everyone's opening move is some flavour of attack. A comparison post. A pointed reminder about supporting local. A note about how *some places* treat you like a number. Nothing named, obviously — just enough that the people who know, know.
Resist it, and not for high-minded reasons. It simply doesn't work.
For a start, you'd be announcing them. A decent chunk of your followers hadn't heard about the new place until you brought it up, and now they have, complete with the implication that you're worried. Worse, it recasts the whole thing as a contest with them as the main event and you as the plucky underdog reacting to it. Nobody chooses a builder, a salon or a coffee shop because it's the brave alternative. They choose it because it's good and it's convenient.
There's also a practical wrinkle: your regulars will be curious about the new place regardless. Some of them will go and have a look. That's not disloyalty, it's just what people are like. Making them feel guilty about it is a strange way to thank them for the last six years.
What an opening actually does to your customers
Openings buy attention, not loyalty. For roughly a fortnight, everyone in a three-mile radius is mildly interested — they'll walk past, they'll try the offer, they'll take a photo of the window. And then the launch budget runs out, the free coffee stops, and everyone returns to the far more powerful force that governs where people spend money: habit.
Your job during that fortnight is not to win an argument. It's to be visible enough that you don't fall out of anybody's head whilst their attention is elsewhere. Silence is the actual risk here. Not the competitor — the three weeks where you post nothing because you're too busy fretting to think of anything to say.
Post the things they physically cannot post
This is where a smaller business has an advantage it almost never uses. A chain's social media is written by somebody in a different city working from a brand template, three weeks in advance. It cannot be specific. You can be specific about absolutely everything.
Name real things. Not "great service" but the actual job you finished on Thursday, the actual road it was on, the actual problem you found under the floorboards. Not "quality ingredients" but the farm, the mill, the bloke who drops the delivery off at half six.
Show who's here. Put your team on the page. Names, faces, how long they've been with you, what they're good at. A customer choosing between two options nearby will pick the one where they already know who they'll be dealing with — that's most of what "supporting local" actually means in practice, and it works far better shown than argued.
Answer the questions people are quietly asking. Are you still open? Have your prices changed? Do you do the thing the new place is advertising? Post the answers plainly. A lot of business gets lost during these weeks not to competition but to confusion.
Show the depth. Post the job that took nine days and the customer you've had since 2014 and the repair on something you sold four years ago. Longevity is the one thing a new arrival cannot fake, and the only way anyone finds out about yours is if you mention it.
Be normal about them. If a customer asks outright, on your page, whether you're worried — answer warmly and briefly and move on. "Plenty of room for both of us, we're here as always" does more for you than five defensive paragraphs.
The rhythm matters more than the words
Two or three posts a week, consistently, for the next couple of months will serve you better than a brilliant campaign that runs for nine days and then stops. Openings fade. Habits don't. The business that's still showing up in the feed in November, calmly getting on with it, is the one that ends up looking like the established option — which, incidentally, it is.
If keeping that rhythm going during a stressful stretch is exactly the problem, that's the gap we built Aunty Social to fill: it learns how your business actually talks and keeps a steady flow of posts going out, for £29 a month, so a wobbly few weeks doesn't turn into a silent quarter.
The unit down the road will open. It'll be busy for a bit. Then someone will need something done properly, by somebody who knows the area, and they'll try to remember who that was.
Make sure you've given them something to remember.