Competitive Intelligence From Online Services

Businesses making decisions about their next steps will often benefit from competitive intelligence. There is a growing array of websites that can be used for competitor intelligence. Here we will analyse some of the tools that the web offers for competitor intelligence. Online there are many online tools at the disposal of intelligence analysts, which have the made the job easier. Here are outlined some key services to use for intelligence research.

Corporate or personal accounts on Twitter. Competitors are leaving more and more information on Twitter. Twitter feeds owned by competitor businesses, or indeed any other Twitter feed referring to competitor accounts, can be useful sources of information. Tweets should be monitored regularly either with specially dedicated software or using a more basic manual approach.

Google's YouTube website. YouTube content, being video, may not be as straightforward to process as more traditional text content. YouTube is nonetheless worth exploring as a competitive intelligence analyst. Videos uploaded by employees of your competitors will reveal how they think about key strategic or tactical issues. When a competitor launches a new product, they will often preempt this with YouTube videos, giving a useful early warning notice.

The specialised image library, Flickr. Flickr, not being designed for information research, can be a pain to analyse but there is competitor intelligence there for the analyst who looks hard enough. Images on Flickr can include screenshots and photos of products, or photos of company parties and similar occasions.

Geographical search engines. Competing tools from Google, Microsoft, AOL and others makes geographical data much easier to acquire than used to be the case. Images of competitor facilities, their location and surroundings and other geographical data can be very useful. Slides in a competitive intelligence debrief can usually be improved with map images and photos.

LinkedIn membership. No analysis of a competitor's structure is complete without checking LinkedIn for information. A good competitor intelligence analyst will find it simple to get information about competitors' employees and how they are related to each other.

By: Aqute Intelligence

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Aqute Intelligence is a competitive intelligence company.