Social Media and Competitive Intelligence: What You Need to Know

When you’re posting information to your Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook accounts, anyone can see it. That includes your customers, of course, but it also includes your competition. Social media can provide incredible levels of competitive intelligence — information on what clients you’re working to land, where you’re traveling and even new products you’re going to roll out.

In most cases, it isn’t obvious information. Rather, it’s a case of someone looking at what you’re doing and making a few assumptions. But if you’re traveling to a city where a big client resides, you may be broadcasting what you plan to do in that city without ever saying a word.

Don’t Give Up On Social Media

Using the tools available to gather competitive intelligence isn’t something new — most business owners still scour the news looking for information about the competition. It’s just a case of the tools changing. The big problem is that analysis has improved. We know more about social interaction: we can make an educated guess about why someone changed jobs (whether they were fired or they quit) just by looking at how their LinkedIn profile changes.

You can’t let that sort of improved analysis throw you, though. The benefits of using social media to reach out to potential customers are incredible and worth the chance that you’re broadcasting information your competition can use. But you can minimize the information that your competition can act on by carefully considering what you’re sharing. There’s no particular item that you should avoid posting, unfortunately. It’s a matter of thinking about the whole picture you’re portraying with what you’re posting.

Turning the Tables on the Competition

Especially if your competition is just getting into the social media game, you may have some opportunities to learn about what they’re up yourself. Make a point of following their activities across social networking sites as well as their blogs: that sort of information can help you plan how to respond to their new products or even get a head’s up if they’re in town to try to poach one of your clients. Since this information is out in the open — they’ve posted it themselves — it’s worthwhile to make use of it and learn from it where you can. Don’t let it turn into more of a focus than accomplishing what you need to on those same social networking sites, however: your marketing should come first

It can be tempting to post information that would lead a competitor astray on your social networking profiles. That may be taking things too far, however. Remember that you must balance the needs of those followers who actually want to buy something from you and your concerns about competitors. You want to post the best information you can for your followers and even something that is a little off can turn into a big problem as far as your social media efforts go.

Image by Flickr user Tony the Misfit

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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