Using LinkedIn for Competitive Intelligence
When you are trying to gain competitive intelligence on your competition you will invariably want to use social media to make this process easier. Make sure that you have a strategy in place like the one outlined below so that you can maximize your time when interacting with social media, as you can easily waste a lot of time on methods that aren’t effective and just waste resources. A method that has shown success follows this sequence: kickoff, framing, gathering, curating, story creation, and putting it all together for the final assessment. This is not usually a onetime event and you are likely to repeat this process several times for each client.
Kickoff
Outlining your goals for the competitive swot analysis intelligence gathering is the first step to any good plan. Create expectations and outline the parameters as well as the roles for people in your company to execute the plan. By setting the expectations you will be able to accurately gauge how successful your strategies are at gather actionable competitive intelligence.
Framing
Building a framework is just about getting the low hanging fruit of competitive intelligence. Looking at what you competition has posted or reading articles related to them will start the ball rolling. Some of this information can include: social network interactions, public customer responses, industry publications or blogs, website and maintenance, and stakeholder Interviews. This will give you a good base to start with and needs to have a focus (from the plan) to keep from gathering too much non-actionable information.
Gathering
Start with the intended outcome and then work from there. Gather all of the information that you can but focus only on what you need for that moment. You can use your social media framework to identify the gaps and then look to extra resources to fill them in. These resources include: trade journals, industry reports, public databases, and consumer groups. Keep in mind that each of these data points are just snapshots and it is more valuable to chart over time and try to identify trends.