Twitter is one of the most popular social networks for businesses, and it gives you an advantage that you may never have had before. Because so much Twitter data is public, you can easily use that data to learn so much about your competitor’s followers and strategies.

In this post, we will look at seven ways you can use this data to look behind the scenes of what your competitors are doing.

Before We Get Started

If you are not already using a Twitter management client, I would suggest you try one. It will help you manage most of the following information in one place.

For these examples, I am going to use my Twitter management client, HootSuite, as you can do everything discussed using a free account. You can also do similar setups in other clients such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic, CoTweet, and other applications.

1. Follow Your Competition on Twitter

One of the best ways to get to know what is working for a competitor is to watch what they do.

You don’t even have to directly follow them. Just create a private Twitter list (only visible to you) and add your competitor to that list. If the competitor has more than one primary Twitter account, or all of their employees are on Twitter, include them as well. This way, you will have a stream of incoming information telling you exactly how they handle their Twitter strategy. 

You can create a private Twitter list on Twitter by selecting “New List” on your homepage sidebar, or created it directly in HootSuite by adding a new stream, selecting your Twitter account, and Create a New List. Then add all of the relevant Twitter accounts.

In the above example, I am following two accounts from Best Buy. Within just a few moments, I see that one account is helping people with their technical questions, while the other is sending out advertisements, as well as mentioning blog posts from employees active on Twitter.

They are even leveraging the ability to include @replies to celebrities when applicable with their latest deals, maybe in hopes that one will pick it up and comment or retweet:

2. Monitor Their @Replies

Why watch just one side of the conversation?

Setting up a search for your competitor’s @username will give you a look into what people are saying to your competitor. This way, you can see what their fans (or enemies) like or dislike about them, as well as questions they have. You can create a search in Twitter by simply searching for the @username of your competitor and using the “Save this Search” option, or creating it as a new stream in HootSuite.

As you can see in the above example, you can create a more advanced search query in HootSuite. This one uses the keyword search for both of the company’s Twitter usernames. Now you can have one stream showing mentions of either username.

Now, imagine if, while analyzing your competitor, you find that they are not answering their customers’ questions, but you can. Or you are seeing specific complaints about your competitors about a particular product or service, and you can offer them something better.

For example, when I was having hosting issues, a few of my followers @replied me to tell me about hosting services they used that didn’t have the same kind of problems. When three different people told me about the same host, I went and checked out their company.

Please note, however, that you have to have a good strategy in place to let those people know about your site. I might have been less likely to check out another company if the company had been messaging me instead of my followers.

The lesson?

Replying to someone with a blatant sales pitch might get you labeled a spammer. But simply offering a helpful suggestion about how to choose the right product, and then leaving it up to them to make the decision is a lot more likely to pay off.

3. Analyze Their Followers

Have you ever wanted to get some insight into your competitor’s client list?

Well, now you can.

Services like Tweepi allow you to bring up their follower list and sort it by the number of updates their followers have, their following count, etc. so you can essentially find out who some of their most active and influential fans are.

You can also run your competitors through TwitterCounter, which will show you how quickly your competitor is getting followers, how often they tweet per day, and the number of days it will take to reach their next milestone of followers.

Use this information wisely, though. Don’t just start spamming your competitor’s followers with tweets, hoping to grab their attention. Use the above tools to find out who the influential people in your niche are, and then work to build a genuine relationship with them.

4. Check Out Their Toolkit

One way to see what tools your competitor uses to manage their Twitter is to see where their tweets are coming from.

In HootSuite, or directly on their Twitter profile, you will see the timestamp for each of their updates and via the tool the update was sent with. By clicking on this, you can see what applications, services, etc. they use to update their account.

If you’re monitoring your competitor’s @replies, you will even be able to see which updates by your competitors get the most response, and then follow the update to the tool that it was created by and try it out yourself.

5. See What They Do on Other Social Networks

Many people connect their Twitter account to other social networks like YouTube, Facebook, and others, so many of their status updates from those networks will trickle through their Twitter stream.

And assuming your competitor has a good Twitter background design, they will probably list their primary social outlets on that as well. These will be good opportunities to find out what other networks your competitor uses and how they use them so you can include them in your own strategy.

6. Keep Up With Their Blog Posts and Articles

Blogging and other forms of content marketing are great strategies for generating traffic and building relationships with your customers. It gives them new visitors a reason to visit your site and current customers reasons to keep returning for more.

If your competitor is getting a lot of attention based on their blog posts and articles (something you will likely see if they get a lot of article retweets in their @replies), then this is a strategy you will want to start utilizing as well. And even if they’re not, it may be a way you can gain an advantage over them.

7. Get Their Score

Want to know more about your competitors’ overall Twitter score? Twitter Grader allows you to enter the username of anyone on Twitter and get a rating on their Twitter presence.

This report will also show you the top most mentioned keywords in the user’s tweets. You can compare your score to theirs, and see suggestions in the report for what you could be doing better.

You can also sign up for Klout using your Twitter account and analyze the influence of your competitor. This report analyzes the interaction a Twitter user gets from their followers, retweets, follower to following ratio, and other factors that determine the true reach of a user’s tweets.

Do You Stalk the Competition?

Have you ever followed and monitored your competition to see what it is that they are doing that you could be doing better?

What have you learned that benefited your own Twitter and social media strategy?

Please share your experiences in the comments.

About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing, including social networking strategies and blogging tips.

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube — they’re all powerful tools for marketing your business online, and you might be tempted to pursue them all. Before long, you’ll have half a dozen accounts, hundreds of people to respond to on each website, and a sense of dread about what’ll happen to your online reputation if you can’t manage it all.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

There are plenty of things you can do to simplify your social media marketing strategy. Here are eleven of my favorites to get you started:

1. Only Go Where Your Customers Are

There are so many social media channels nowadays that it can be overwhelming just trying to figure out which sites you need to participate on. The simplest solution: focus on the sites where your prospective customers are already congregating.

For most businesses, that’s going to include the two big social media sites of the moment: Facebook and Twitter. Beyond that, though, it will depend largely on the niche you’re targeting. Listen to your customers, and see which ones they talk about most, and then deliberately ignore all the rest.

Not only will it take less time, but you’ll be able to do it better. By limiting the number of sites you’re focusing on, you’ll be able to give each one the attention it deserves, and over the long run, that will pay off with much deeper engagement with your customers.

2. Take Advantage of Available Tools

There are hundreds of tools out there that can help you better manage your social media presence. Most of these let you update all of your accounts from one, meaning you only have to visit one site, rather than half a dozen.

A few tools you might want to check out include:

• Flock, a web browser with built-in social media and blogging tools.
• TweetDeck, a Twitter client that also has support for MySpace and Facebook updates.
• HootSuite, an online Twitter client with support for Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, MySpace, and others, as well as support for multiple authors and scheduling of updates.
• Ping.fm, an online tool with support for virtually every major social media site and blogging platform.

3. Share the Responsibility

If you look at the successful social media efforts of many companies, both large and small, you’ll see that they don’t just have one person in charge of their social media activities. They have multiple people all chipping in.

Companies like Wired magazine and Etsy use one employee at a time to update their Twitter feeds, rotating that employee on a regular basis. Some companies do it daily, while others rotate on a weekly basis. Either way, everyone gets to disconnect and take a break.

Other companies, such as MediaTemple and Comcast, have several people working at once. Employees may either update one account (often signing their respective updates with initials) or each have accounts that are then associated with their employer (such as ComcastBonnie and ComcastSteve on Twitter, both representatives of Comcast).

4. Enlist Help from the Community

Providing useful, relevant information to your social media friends and followers gets difficult after a while. When you’re immersed in a subject day after day, it all starts to sound the same, and you end up spending more and more time finding content to post.

The simplest fix: ask your community for help.

Let everyone know you’re looking for fresh, interesting content, and then let them send you ideas. You can also follow others who post relevant links and then repost it. No, you won’t be releasing totally original content, but most people won’t care. Chances are, they’re not following the same people you are, so they’ll hear it from you first anyway.

5. Schedule Your Updates

The best social media management tools allow you to schedule updates. This lets you batch your messages so they post regularly throughout the day. Rather than taking five minutes every hour to post an update, you can just take half an hour in the morning or evening to schedule all of your posts for the day.

6. Don’t Follow Everyone Who Follows You

It’s common to feel like you should follow everyone who follows you.

On sites like Facebook, following is a two-way street. You accept a friend request and they automatically see your updates as you see theirs. But on sites like Twitter, users can follow you without any technical requirement to follow them back.

A lot of people think it’s good manners to follow anyone who follows you, and when you only have a few hundred followers, that can make sense. But as your follower numbers grow from a few hundred to a few thousand or more, trying to keep up with all of those people is impossible, so don’t even try. Nothing says you’re obligated to follow them back, and most people won’t be offended if you don’t.

7. Organize Your Friends and Followers

If you just can’t bring yourself not to follow everyone who follows you, then take advantage of the organizational tools out there to filter your feeds.

Use lists on Twitter to categorize those you follow so you can make sure you’re getting the updates from those you care about most. Use friend lists on Facebook, and don’t be afraid to hide updates from certain people who tend to clog up your news feed.

With other sites, use the filtering tools built into some of the social media management apps mentioned above to organize everyone. You can create lists of most and least important people, allowing you to prioritize who you want to watch the most.

8. Stick to a Time Limit

Social media can be addictive.

It’s easy to get lost spending hours on sites like Twitter and Facebook. You find yourself popping over to check your new notifications every ten minutes, interrupting your other work.

The best solution: use a timer. Set it for 15 or 30 minutes, and when the time is up, make yourself logout. Or, if you’re managing multiple accounts, set the timer for 5 or 10 minutes, and then move on to the next account when it dings.

9. Use Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free service from Google that keeps track of everything published to the web and sends you an email about anything containing keywords you specify.

Rather than spending hours looking for new content to post, set up Google alerts for common keywords and topics associated with your niche. You should also set up alerts for your company name and product names so you know what’s being said about you and your products and can respond appropriately.

You can opt to have the information emailed to you as soon as it’s found, or on a daily or weekly basis. For alerts related to your company or products, immediate alerts are probably the best idea so you know as soon as something is said and can address it quickly. For everything else, a daily digest-style alert is more efficient.

10. Scan Instead of Read

Hang around social media long enough, and you become a master at scanning for relevant information. Reading every update that comes your way would take hours, but you can scan all of them in a few minutes, picking out what’s important and what’s not, and then spending your time where it counts.

The simplest strategy is to look for relevant keywords from your company and industry, and then focus on those. Or, if you’re looking for content to send to your friends and followers, most people will put the headline in their update before the link, allowing you to decide whether or not to click it.

In the beginning, it’ll be tough to figure out what’s relevant and what’s not, but give it time. The longer you are active in social media, the better you get at instinctively spotting things that are important. Like everything else, it just takes practice.

11. Measure Your Impact and Adjust Accordingly

Too often we make a plan for how we’re going to use social media in our business and then blindly stick to that plan for months or years, with little review or adjustment. But that leads to a lot of waste. Like with any other marketing channel, you should periodically review your social media marketing strategy and make any necessary adjustments.

For instance, you may find that you’re just not getting the results you expected from Twitter, Facebook, or one of the other social media sites you were targeting. If that’s the case, do your best to figure out if there’s something you’re doing wrong, and if there’s not, then ask yourself if it’s really worth your time to continue.

This simplifies things by streamlining where we’re placing our efforts. If a certain channel just isn’t working for your business, then stop using it. Refocus your energy into the channels that are working for you.

Social media marketing is powerful, yes, but at the end of the day it’s still just another marketing strategy. You expect it to produce results, and if it’s not, then something has to change.

That’s just smart business.