In the first installment of this blog post, we discussed how to research your business competitors on the largest social networking site, Facebook. Keep in mind though that Facebook is just one avenue that businesses and brands use to keep their social media presence competitive. Another is Twitter, with over 190 million active users and over 60 million tweets per day. In this second installment, we will discuss how to research your competitors on Twitter.
Remember that while the information your competitors post on Twitter is public, it does not reveal an exact blueprint of their marketing or branding strategy. Rather, it will give you a reliable sense of their direction – whether they tweet product or promotions or online articles – and the success of their strategy via Twitter metrics.
Finding Known and Unknown Competitors. It’s safe to assume that, generally, business Twitter accounts are not private. If you have known competitors you’d like to research, a simple way to search them is to visit their website and click on their Twitter icon, which should direct you to their Twitter account. You can also use Google or Twitter search to find them. Twellow and WeFollow are great Twitter directories.
Unlike Facebook where you have to ‘like’ a page to view it, you can browse a user’s Twitter profile without having to ‘follow’ them (assuming, of course, it’s not private). If you have no qualms following your competitors, Twitter lets you create ‘lists,’ which is a great way to organize your followers. You can create a list of ‘Competitors’ to aggregate your Twitter stream from competitors only. Be sure to make this list private; while your competitors might not know that you’ve listed them as a competitor, they’ll be aware that you’re following them.
Tweets. The best way to get a sense of your competitor’s strategy is by perusing through their recent tweets. Inspect what content they’re tweeting whether it’s product promotions or discounts, articles within their niche (that you might belong to also), retweets from followers or direct message to followers. You can get a sense of the success of their strategy by looking at the number of followers that they have. A more important metric is their Follower-to-Following ratio. If more people are following your competitors than they’re following, and their numbers are in the thousands, this is certainly a measure of strategy success. Think of how you can emulate or, better yet, improve on your competitor’s Twitter strategy.
Followers. Look through your competitor’s followers list and see what followers they’re attracting. If you recognize any big industry experts, this should signal to you that their Twitter strategy is working. Tweepi is an excellent Twitter tool that lets you see important Twitter information in one page, such a user’s bio, followers, and following, etc.
Another thing to analyze about their Followers is their Klout. Klout is a measure of influence (how they’re interacting with Followers and if they’re Followers are interacting back) within their circle of followers. If your competitors have Followers in the thousands but have a low Klout score, then they don’t have much influence. However, if their Followers are in the thousands and they have a high Klout score, their tweets are then more than likely inspiring a lot of call-to-action.
Ultimately, when researching your competitors on Twitter, get a sense of their content strategy by perusing their recent tweets. Measure your competitor’s strategy but inspecting how many followers they have, their followers-to-following ratio, and measuring their Klout score. If these metrics indicate that your competitor’s strategy is successful, devise your own strategy that would one-up your competitor’s.
Written By: Jaszver Bauzon