emerged media

highlighting the best digital advertising campaigns, interactive marketing trends, technological innovation, and anything else that inspires creative thought, pushes the interactive medium, and creates a conversation. by brian o'shea

Use Twitter to Gain Competitive Advantage

twitter has become one of the most popular social networks for companies to use as a broadcast vehicle to introduce new products, manage customer relationships, and to both start and monitor a brand discussion.  because so much of the twitter data is public, it can be easily used to help your company gain a competitive advantage.

here are a few simple ways (and tools) that can be used to get a glimpse behind the curtain to see how your competitors are using twitter to promote their business.

  1. follow your competitors - it’s pretty simple, but very effective.  if you don’t want your competitors to know that you are following them, you can create a private twitter list that is only available to you.  if your competitor has more than one twitter account, be sure to add them as well.  add their ceo, cmo, and other company employees who may inadvertently leak that they are introducing a new product or just secured a media buy for the super bowl. 
  2. monitor their replies - to follow both sides of the conversation.  you can use tools like twitter search (http://search.twitter.com/) to search for your competitor’s @username to see what people are saying about your competitor.  other tools like topsy (http://topsy.com/) will allow you to perform a social search and with snapbird (http://snapbird.org/) you can view a competitor’s tweet history.
  3. analyze their followers - who your friends are, both online and offline, says a lot about you.  services like tweepi (http://tweepi.com/new/index.php/) allow you to not only manage your own list of followers, but also access your competitor’s followers to see who their most active and influential brand ambassadors are.  twittercounter (http://twittercounter.com/) will also show you how quickly your competitors are gaining followers, how often they tweet per day, and the number of days it will take to reach their next milestone. 
  4. see what they do on other social networks - it’s become a pretty standard practice to connect your twitter accounts with facebook, youtube, and other social networks.  as a result, many of your status updates will be accessible through the twitter stream.  other social network links may be listed on your competitor’s wall or twitter page.  use these as a reference to help define your own social networking strategy.
  5. get their score - to obtain a rating on your competitor’s twitter presence use twittergrader (http://twittergrader.com/) to see how influential they are on twitter.  twittergrader is a free tool that allows you to check the power of a profile compared to millions of others that have been graded.  

remember that knowledge is power and with great power comes great responsibility.  use these tools to monitor the conversation, find the influential people in your niche, and then start to build a genuine relationship with them.  happy stalking :)