Monitoring Your Competitiors on Social Media

Marketers the world over are using social media not only to connect with customers and prospects, but also to see how well their competition is doing. As the wired social world grows in sophistication, so do the means to monitor the conversation.

Sure, it’s easier than ever to keep an eye on the competition, but exactly where does one begin, you ask?

Bill Balderaz is founder of Webbed Marketing, which develops fully integrated marketing campaigns taking advantage of all possible online resources – SEO, SEM, online public relations and social media.

Bill offers three sound tips for using social media to keep an eagle eye on your rivals:

Set up Tweetbeep

“If you can use Google Alerts, you can use Tweetbeep,” says Bill. Tweetbeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter. Get emailed when someone is twittering about you, your company, your product, or your website. Visit Tweetbeep.com to enter competitors’ names; you’ll get email alerts whenever someone tweets about them. Competitors’ clients will tweet about how well (or poorly) the latest pitch went, their employees will complain about working all night to get the new product into beta. A reporter will talk about using them for a source. Customers will talk about pricing.

Get “LinkedIn”

Q: What does LinkedIn know about a company? A: Who joined, who left, who got promoted, who is connected to whom. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the internet, with more than 90 million members in over 200 countries and territories.

It is a great network for recruiting competitive talent, identifying companies intimately connected to your competitors, or checking the veracity of rumours that your rival is having a shakeup.

Visit linkedin.com/companies to see your company profile and your competitors’.

Go Deeper with Manta

Manta is the largest free source of information on small companies, helping professionals to promote their business, sell faster and make business connections. Manta profiles more than 63 million companies and specializes in hard-to-find information about small businesses and private firms and has over 646,000 listings for Australian businesses. Use its free membership to track competitive data like annual revenue, key contacts, affiliates and number of employees. Premium financial reports can also be had for a fee.

The Point

Stay in the know. Don’t get caught off-guard by rivals that likely use tools to track your movements. Like any good spy, you can know them as well as they know you.