Written by ContentPowered.com
Twitter is a great platform for marketing, but it can also give away a lot of information about you and your business marketing strategy. You might be surprised at how much information you can learn about your competitors if you do a little digging and some creative thinking.
Find Your Competition
The first thing you need to do is identify your competition. You can do this in a few ways.
- Gather up a list of known competitors from your website and previous marketing efforts. Chances are you know a few of your competitors, though you may not know all of them.
- Run Google searches for your target keywords and your products, as well as your primary niche. Find any other businesses that are trying to occupy those niches and add their names to the list.
- Use social listening services to find what users on Facebook and Twitter are saying about your business, your niche and your competition. You may find other businesses this way.
Once you have a list of businesses competing with you in your niche, you need to find their Twitter accounts.
- Visit their websites and poke around for social media buttons. If they have a Twitter account, they very likely are advertising it on their site.
- If you can’t find it on their site, run a Google search for their business name and Twitter. You may be able to find their account this way.
If you still can’t find their account, they might not have one; you can eliminate them from the list, or put them on another list to watch in the future.
Analyze Their Strategy
The most public bit of information you can find about a business through Twitter is, obviously enough, their tweets. Check what they’re doing when they tweet. Are they promoting their products? Are they sharing discounts? Are they posting about their posts on other social media sites? Are they sharing blog posts? Are they replying directly to followers? You can ask and answer dozens of questions about their strategy. You can even, if you feel like recording statistics, go back through their Twitter archive and compile metrics of how often they post their own content, how often they retweet other content and how often they reply to customer interaction.
One thing to consider is how they present themselves. Do they take a playful attitude with comments and contests? Do they prefer a more factual, insightful strategy? Do they respond frequently, or do they select only certain comments for reply? How the competition presents itself is a good display of how they want their audience to see them, and it can give you ideas for your own campaign.
Examine Their Followers
There are going to be two primary types of people following a business account, be it yours or your competitions. First will be the largest group, the customers. These are the people you want to attract because they buy your product. Second are the businesses partnering with or associating with the account owner. These partners can be valuable, but you very likely won’t be able to poach them from a competitor’s account.
It’s very easy to view, through Twitter, everyone who follows a specific account. This gives you an immediate list of users you can monitor for a number of reasons. You can also invest in a tool like Tweepi to see more detailed information in a spreadsheet.
Watch Mentions
You can run a search through twitter for any time the competitor’s account is @mentioned in a tweet. This will give you a feed of any time a user says something they want the company to see. Most of these messages are likely to be praise, thanks or just a message to the user’s friends about a deal they found at the store. You will be able to see many of the possible customer service issues the company has, however, and that’s a valuable insight.
- Identify trending successes; what is the business doing right?
- Identify trending failures; what are the most common complains?
- Who is least satisfied? You may be able to reach out to the people unsatisfied with the competition and give them another option.
What sort of hashtags does your competition use in their marketing? You may see tags they create for specific campaigns. You may also see tags they have identified as sources of potential conversions. These tags may be useful for you to target as well, if you think you can provide some value. You can also spin off from those tags and look for similar tags with similar audiences to target.
If the competition is pushing a hashtag and meeting resistance, this also may become an opportunity to create a counter-offer. Create a tag poking fun at their campaign and offer a deal to their unsatisfied users to draw them into your userbase.
Watch Popular Content
Some Twitter tools, like Topsy, will analyze a Twitter account and show you a report of the most popular content. Specifically, it will show you what posts are shared most often and which receive the most retweets. This gives you another opportunity.
You can, for example, analyze the content for what it brings to the table and do what it does, better. You could respond directly to the content with your own rebuttal. You can also see what content performs most poorly, and use it as a warning to stay clear.
This will also give you a bit of insight into which posts the competition deems valuable enough to sponsor.
Once you’ve done your initial research, you can set up Twitter alerts to notify you if something changes, such as an edited profile in one of your competitors accounts. This can give you a good idea of when they roll out changes to their business or their marketing. This helps you be much more responsive in your advertising and allows you to capitalize on their failures and blind spots.
