How to watch your competitors on Twitter, without them knowing!

Without question, Twitter is a powerful research resource.

Even if an organisation chooses not to have a public Twitter profile, they can still be listening via the real time chatter which is happening on Twitter all the time.

With over 400 millions tweets per day, it’s a noisy space. However, there are ways that you can cut through the noise and also segment the noise, via Twitter lists (see more on lists here).

One area I often get asked about is competitor watch via Twitter. And this is a relatively simple thing to do.

You can create Twitter Lists which are private or public. If public, anyone can see the list you have created and others can interact and even follow that list.

If private – only you can see that list.

Therefore, if you wanted to build a competitor watch list, you can do so very simply:

1. Login to your Twitter
2. Go to the list section, click ‘create new list’.
3. Choose a name for your list, eg: Competitors
4. Click the ‘private list’ option.
5. Click ‘create list’.

Once the list is in place you are then encouraged to add people to that list.  You them simply search for your competitors on Twitter and rather than ‘follow them’ (so then they’d know you were watching everything they were tweeting about) – you can simply add them to your competitor list.

If you are using a dashboard such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, you have options to pull various streams into that dashboard. So alongside your streams you can pull in your competitor list, so that you can keep a watchful eye on what they’re up to in real time.

Lists do have limits, you can only add up to 500 Twitter accounts to a list. However, it’s highly unlikely you have more than 500 competitors.

That’s it. Simple eh!

Get going Clouseau.

Associated blog posts:

Twitters Lists, what they are and how to leverage them.

Social Dashboards, Managing multiple social media accounts.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of marketing strategy and online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

Want to talk to the team at Carvill Creative about your social media activity or training needs? We’re happy to chat, so simply ‘get in touch’.

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