Social Media for Competitive Intelligence: A strategy for success

By Alexandra Smith

At Podcamp 5 Boston, Michelle Wolverton’s  “Using Social Media for Competitive Intelligence” provides tips to find out your competitor’s self perception and weaknesses to use for your business’ development.

Start your computers and get ready to rumble…

Round 1:  Take data and analyze it to obtain competitive intelligence

• Data: information put on social networks about services and products.  You need three sources of data to confirm a fact.
• Competitive intelligence: putting puzzle pieces* together to find out how to make your product and its features grow.
• Puzzle pieces = new technology, new products and services, new markets, mergers, and acquisitions.

Round 2: Use social media networks

LinkedIn, various job boards, etc. – to find out what companies are looking for in their candidates. This will help you determine what kind of products they need to do their jobs.

• Look at key terms – what market is the competitor trying to attract?
• How does the competitor view itself? Who do they think they are? How do they want to be searched?
• Look at the social media profiles of competitors’ employees (i.e. disgruntled employees’ Facebook posts) – it will tell you what the competitor is doing wrong internally.

Social Media provides an advantage on your competition

• You must have a system to collect this information from social media – get a dashboard, listening platform, etc.
  • Have a list of your competitors and sift through all of their employees’ SM posts
• With Google Research, you can see who is using what keywords. This is valuable internally.
  • What are your company’s keywords?
• Use Twiangulate.com to find out what competitors are following your company’s moves and posts. Use this for business intelligence.
• RSS feeds can be valuable to help you gather information, but you need people who are responsible purely for analyzing them.
• A daily Google search for all of this information would take way too much time.

And some final things to keep in mind before entering the competition

• Like any skill or sport, this will not have good ROI at the beginning: It takes time.  Practice makes perfect, right?
• Understand that you missed important information in the past, but you can be prepared to respond the next time.

Which tools are you using? Or what’s keeping you from utilizing social media in this way?