SOCIAL ESPIONAGE

GATHERING INTELLIGENCE TO CRUSH THE COMPETITION

INTRODUCTION
After 30 years working at the Eastman Kodak Company, Harold C. Worden
set out on his own. The then recent pensioner started his own consulting
shop in the film industry. Upon retirement, Worden took much of the
confidential information from his work on a certain film technique Kodak was
developing at the time. He was able to obtain knowledge gained from other
Kodak retirees who were doing much the same thing. He even recruited his
successor to continue to provide confidential documents and information on
Kodak’s technology – espionage at its finest. In 1997, he was tried and found
guilty of corporate espionage for selling trade secrets to a Chinese company
who wanted to break into the film manufacturing business.

“The Cold War is not over, it has merely

moved into a new arena: the global marketplace.”
So reads an FBI bulletin on corporate espionage, created around the1996
Economic Espionage Act Espionage is a sinister word, conjuring images
of unethical and dangerous behavior, spies and theft. Hearing the words
corporate espionage send a shiver down many corporate strategists’
spines. A good strategist will tend to shy away from scandal-inducing
business practices – and with good reason! The negative connotations
associated with the word espionage are burned into our collective psyche
as something that only criminals do.
With social networks becoming a marketing necessity, there are
businesses that will go to great lengths to get a leg up on the
competition – whether by hiring 3rd party solutions like SpyFu, paying
for proprietary databases, or even engaging in deals to obtain marketing
strategies and information from insiders like Harold Worden. But there
is a type of espionage that isn’t unethical and has everything to do with
strategy. Shall we call it intelligence?

2 • Introduction
Competitive espionage, or rather competitive intelligence, can be
performed in a “white hat” way – especially in the social media world. This
type of intelligence and analysis allows you to benchmark and collect data
on your competitors’ social media performance to find out how they’re
obtaining results, where they succeed, and where they’ve failed. Digital
“surveillance” can be performed by “spying” on, or monitoring the publicly
available data that comes from social networks. Using this information, you
have the power to leverage their strategy to your benefit, and expand your
strategy where they’ve got holes.

Knowing and understanding your competition is an essential way to

see where your business stands in your industry. With only a little digital
snooping, you can use the traditional SWOT analysis (to determine
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) or go beyond the
basic SWOT and build a full competitive landscape map that helps you
understand your market share in relation to your competition. Whatever the
level of analysis you want to do, we’ll help you come up with a basic plan to
collect social networking information about your competitors and analyze
their activity to improve your marketing strategy.

3 • Introduction
A SHORT HISTORY OF COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE
For most of us in the more ordinary business world, competitive data helps compile the data and produce periodic reports about the competitors the
us benchmark our performance and give us a point of reference for our company is interested in.
activity and results. In a way, it serves a psychological need to be aware
The recent introduction of public APIs (application programming interface)
of our strategic strengths, have confidence in our work, and to know that
from the major social networks have taken the competitive intelligence
we’re either crushing our competitors or we’re not that far off.
to new heights. Most social networks now offer a programmatic way to
The mass adoption of social media as a legitimate marketing channel by pull data out of the networks and into a 3rd party solution, like Simply
companies in the last few years introduced a new path for competitive Measured. These solutions need to adhere to the networks guidelines
intelligence that didn’t exist until now. The public nature of social media and terms, but once approved, they get access to a plethora of social data
interaction allows companies to more easily collect information about their that can be used in various ways. Given the public nature of social media
competitors, their activity on social media and their engagement with their interaction, one of those ways is competitive intelligence.
audience. On other marketing channels, the marketing activity might be
public, but the results are private – you can see a display ad, but you can’t
tell how many people saw it and how many people clicked on it. However,
in the world of social media, the results are public as well.
This provides companies a never-before insight into what tactics used
by their competitors are actually working to drive engagement, positive
sentiment and real business results. In addition, social media data also
provides unparalleled view into the audience sentiment and reaction to
marketing activities, and the combination of these factors make competitive
intelligence even more important than before.

In light of all this free data, companies have started collecting pieces
of this information periodically by either using in house “labor” or
outsourcing the collection of that information to “Mechanical Turks” that

4 • Competitive Intelligence
THE 4 CATEGORIES
OF COMPETITIVE
INTELLIGENCE AND
ANALYSIS
A look at your competitors’
presence, audience, activity
and engagement
4 CATEGORIES OF COMPETITIVE
INTELLIGENCE AND ANALYSIS
Gathering data on your competitors periodically will help you identify
both strengths and weaknesses in your social strategy. Using a dedicated
measurement tool, you should gather competitive data, which can be
grouped into 4 categories.
Presence:
• Which social networks do your competitors use? Which channels do
they use most? Least? This will give you some insight into which social
channels perform well for competitors in your industry.
• How big is their social presence? What type of presence do they have
(proactive, reactive, inactive)? Do the have multiple profiles or just
one? Are they centralized or distributed? These questions will help you
determine their strategy for utilizing social media as a marketing tool.
You may find that their customer service handles perform well, or that
their social efforts seem scattered.
Audience:
• How big is their audience? And what is their growth rate? This will help
you determine goals for audience building.
• Who are their audience? What platforms do they use, and how do they
use them? Where are they located? This will help you outline your
competitors’ customer personas, giving you insight into who they’re
selling to, and why.
6 • Competitive Intelligence
Activity/campaign:
• When do they post and how frequently? What type of content do
they post? Does this change based on the time? This will give you
insight into their posting cadence that you can correlate to things like
engagement, audience growth, and other content performance metrics.
• After performing a deep content analysis, what keywords are they
using? Which types of content perform well? Which types of content
perform poorly? How much of their content is paid versus organic?
What are the elements of their top performing posts? This will give
you insight into the strengths and weaknesses of their content
strategy so you can make sure to avoid pitfalls and produce only
content that resonates.
Engagement:
• After performing an engagement analysis, what is their average
engagement per post? Which types of content work well with
which audiences? Doing this will help you set goals for increasing
engagement, and promoting your content.
THE PROCESS OF
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
How to collect and organize
your competitors’ data
THE PROCESS OF COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
With the previous questions in mind you’ll need to set out a plan for the
data you need to collect, and how to organize it. You’ll want to know what
you’re looking at and how to analyze it to gain insight into your competitors’
strategies. Then you’ll want a way to report on that data to show your
insights and make recommendations based on that. Let’s break down this
process step-by-step.
Data collection and organization
Collecting and organizing the data for your competitive analysis might
seem tedious. What do you collect? From where? And how? And once you
get all that info, what do you do with it?
Presence
First, take note of each of your competitors and the social networks on
which they have a presence. Do the same for your own accounts so that
you can compare your own statistics. This might be easiest done in a
spreadsheet, where you can note down whether their presence is active,
reactive or inactive, like so:
COMPANY X ACTIVE ACTIVE & ACTIVE REACTIVE INACTIVE
REACTIVE
8 • Competitive Analysis
At this point, you’re just noting the most basic data from scanning their
social profiles. We’ll examine their exact post cadence later. If a company
doesn’t have an account on a certain social channel, or hasn’t posted since
2012, you can assume they’re inactive. That’s pretty obvious, right?
If a company has a reactive account, their main mission is to hang onto
the customers they currently have. They likely use their account primarily
for listening and customer service resolution. If the company’s account
is active, they’re likely using the social network to engage potential
customers. Much of their activity will be focused on content creation and
virality. Some companies may take a reactive/active approach, using social
networking for both listening and for pushing out content as thought
leadership. In this case, you may want to scan their most recent posts
and determine what percentage of their content falls under the active or
reactive categories.
One of the great debates in social media management is the question of
whether to have a dedicated social media person who handles “official”
social media posts and responses, or to let those who are experts in your
company post to your social media accounts. Having only one person
responsible for social media conversations means that response times are
often increased and the tone of voice is more formal or more consistent.
In contrast, letting different departments reply using their own expertise
allows for a more conversational voice, decreased response times, and,
more accurate responses.
Besides being able to identify whether their accounts are centralized
or decentralized, consider the tone of their posts. Are they personal
and friendly? Do they take a more conventional corporatized approach?
Do they seem cheeky and fun-loving? Answering these questions will
give you some insight into their relationship with customers in your
industry, and whether or not those customers see your competitors as
approachable or aloof.

After categorizing their post activity, note how much they utilize each social
media account. Running a Simply Measured competitive analysis for each
channel will provide this information.

If you’re Delta, for example, you’ll notice that your Facebook post cadence 01 | Brand Posts and Tweets Per Day
Here, we show you the count of both Facebook posts and Tweets for several major
is on the high end versus your competitors, but that your brand has airlines. American leads the way in Tweets per day. Delta leads with Facebook posts.
significantly fewer Tweets per day than your competitors (Figure 01). This
could lead to less visibility and thus lower engagement rates on Twitter. We
performed a study on the correlation between post frequency and Twitter
engagement and discovered that posting more often has a tendency to
increase engagement (Figure 02). This could be drastic for your brand as
organic reach declines on Facebook, and Twitter becomes more of a go-to
source for news and real-time chatter.

02 | Engagement Per Post

We found that the Engagement Per Post went down significantly when we posted
at 30 minute intervals vs 15 minute intervals.

9 • Competitive Analysis
You’ll also want to look at when your competitors post. Posting at certain
times of the day can drive engagement within certain audience segments
depending on who that audience is. Running a Simply Measured Multiple
Channel report will show you the best time and day to post, based on the
times and days your competitors’ post (Figure 03). While you may not get
a drilled down idea of when each competitor posts, you will know what
cadence your industry has and compare that against your own post cadence.

Once you determine their style, tone, and cadence, you should dive into
your competitors’ audience metrics. Find out how large their audiences are,
and what their average audience growth looks like.

03 | When Brands Post

Here you can see when Tweets had the most engagement. Posting between
7:00 AM and 7:00 PM earns the most engagement for airline brands.

10 • Competitive Analysis
Audience
In these Simply Measured Competitive Analysis reports, you can see which
accounts have the highest number of followers and which accounts have
the highest average daily growth rate (Figure 04).
Using our reports, you can also collect and analyze data about your
competitors’ audiences - including a list of all their followers - allowing you
to target them using social media.
This list can be a great source of information about that audience: where
they are located (geo-location), what platforms they are using and what
time of day and day of the week they are most active. You can also get
information about their most engaging and influential followers and target
them to earn more share of voice (Figure 05). Lastly, you can export the data
about their followers and your followers and run an analysis on the overlap
and gap to find the audience they have that you don’t.

05 | Most Influential Followers

Who are your most influential followers and what topics do they care about?

04 | Total Facebook Fans and Total Twitter Followers

Competitive Analysis Reports place the number of followers next to the per-
day growth rate for each airline. This would allow Jet Blue, for example, to set
benchmarks for growth rate.

11 • Competitive Analysis
Activity and campaigns
It’s important to collect data about your competitors’ activity. For example,
you can manually collect the data off the social networks and log it, or
use a social media measurement tool like Simply Measured to gather
information on their post data. This would give you all their posting
information including all their posts and the performance of each post.

This data will allow you to gain a deep understanding of both the type of
content they are posting as well as specific campaigns they are running.
The keyword analysis will tell you what they are focusing on and how they
structure their campaigns (Figure 06). You can follow up by looking at the
URLs within their posts to garner more information on what and how they
are marketing their product or services.

06 | Top Keywords
What do your competitors post about? A Keyword Analysis will tell you what they’re talking about and how often.

12 • Competitive Analysis
Engagement
Look at how much your competitors’ audience engages. It’s especially
handy to know what percentage of your competitors’ current audience
actively clicks on their content.
07 | Facebook and Twitter Engagement
Engagement as a percent of total followers or fans will show just how valuable
your current audience is in helping generate awareness around your brand.
13 • Competitive Analysis
Looking at engagement as a percent of total fans tells a lot about the
value of your current audience. Alaska Airlines may have a relatively
small amount of engagement over this report period, but their
engagement rate as a percentage of their total fans is higher than
some of their competitors (Figure 07). This could be attributed to a good
audience-building strategy or a good engagement-building strategy.
Where engagement is concerned, looking at what types of posts your
competitors make, and which types of posts perform the best is a
great way to gain insight on what their content strategy is and how it’s
working (Figure 08).
08 | Content Performance
Content strategy will help you determine what to post to earn engagement -
in the context of what you and your competitors post.
You’ll also need to consider their response rates – how often they respond
to user posts that mention the brand. A high response rate indicates more
interactions with fans, which could be leading to higher engagement rates.
You can find response rate by looking at the total number of mentions the
brand has replied to, divided by the total brand mentions – minus retweets
on Twitter (Figure 09).

Now you’ll want to look at your competitors’ share of voice. How much
are people talking about each brand? Finding out how often each of your
competitors comes up on social media can be helpful for benchmarking
your status among that group (Figure 10).
09 | Page Admin Replies
When considering share of voice, look into topics that your competitors Are your competitors good at responding to audience posts? If your
talk about, or that their audience talks about. Look for influencers – users industry has a focus on customer service and retention, response rate
with high follower counts who seem to be authorities on your industry, could really affect your bottom line.

or users who are advocates for either your competitors or your industry.
And finally, examine their audience statistics – do they seem to be mostly
male? Female? Are they younger or older? What are their interests based
on their profile data? How often do they post and how often do they
talk about your industry? What is the general sentiment surrounding the
brands and the industry when these audiences talk to or about them? The
Simply Measured Social Analytics tools allow you to look into details like
keywords, influencers, trends and hashtags. Take detailed notes on what
you discover.

10 | Share of Voice
Who is the most talked-about brand in your industry? Is it you, or one of
your competitors? Knowing your share of voice will show you where you
stand with your target audience.

14 • Competitive Analysis
DATA ANALYSIS
At this point you should have the following data:

• Who your competitors are, and which networks they’re on.

INTERNAL EXTERNAL

• How active, reactive, or inactive are they on social networks?

STRENGTHS OPPORTUNITIES
• Are there any secondary profiles? Are these profiles centralized
or decentralized?
• How often do they post, and when? WEAKNESSES THREATS
• How big is their audience, and what is their growth rate?
• How much engagement do they earn, and how much of that is
It’s helpful to perform a SWOT analysis like the model we mentioned earlier.
from their fans?
Looking at your social media performance, fill in the internal column with
• What kind of content do they post and how does that perform?
your strengths and weaknesses. Then using your competitors’ data, fill
• How many user posts do they respond to? in the external column with opportunities to outdo your competition and
• How large is the market share of voice surrounding your competitors threats to your success.
and is the sentiment good, fair, poor, or negative overall?
In your analysis, you’ll also want to compare and contrast your brand’s
• What are the demographics or information you discovered about metrics against those of your competitors to show where your brand is
your competitors’ audience? hitting industry benchmarks.

Having collected the data for both your competitors and your own account
and you’ll need to analyze that data to see where your brand stands in
relation to your competitors.

15 • Data Analysis
 Ask yourself, “Why do they do what they do,
and why do they have the following they have?”

Your analysis should aim to illustrate why or how your competitors’ social
media behavior is the way it is. For example, if they’re not using Instagram,
you’ll need to ask why. What do they know about the social network that
you don’t? Or are they just oblivious to the obvious benefits of building a
presence on that network? Ask how your competitors built the following
they have – is it through multiple photo posts? Or do they have a much
more diverse mix of content types that drive engagement? How could their
post cadence and timing contribute to that success? Who are their major
influencers and brand detractors? How are they leveraging influencers or
managing detractors? Of course, there’s a little bit of speculation you may
have to do around your competitors’ motives, but with a complete set of
data, this speculation will be informed enough to make recommendations
on how to better your social strategy.

16 • Data Analysis
REPORTING: INSIGHTS AND RECOMMENDATION
Now that you’ve analyzed the data you found, you can report on your
findings and make recommendations based on what you discovered. Much
of your analysis will speak for itself. You’ll be able to see who has the best
numbers, who has the worst numbers, and where you are in that pack. Your
insights will answer questions like:
• Are there networks we should be using that we are not?
• What is our market share of voice in contrast to our competitors?
• Are there trends or influencers we could use to increase our
market share of voice?
• What is our engagement in contrast to our competitors?
• How do we drive engagement to outshine our competition?
Do we need to be more responsive? More present? More active
on social networks?
• What is a good growth rate for our industry?
• Have we identified any data that may help us boost our growth rate?
• Do we need to shift the types of content we post, or the times
at which we post?
• What advantages does my competitor have? What advantages
does my brand have?
• Is the content they share curated from other sites, or is the majority
of their content original?
17 • Reporting
The report itself should start with an industry brief – an overview of your
competitors and their social networking profiles, along with an overview of
yours. You should introduce what’s happening in the market and your own
standing. In addition, you may want to introduce your target audience (and
any modifications to that based on your competitor data). Then you’ll want
to dive into any competitive advantages you and your competitors have.
Who’s doing it right? Support this with data you collected and analyzed.
Here, you’ll outline your audience growth rates, engagement rates, share of
voice, and more.
Next, you’ll present the insights you came up with as a result of your
analysis. How can you leverage the data you found to create actionable
strategies in your marketing efforts? What are your strengths and
weaknesses? What can you “steal” from your competitors’ strategy to
improve your own? Outline opportunities for success, and threats that need
to be mitigated in order to be successful. Make recommendations based
on these insights. For example, you might find that you should devote more
attention to one social network, or that you should post more frequently.
You may find post types or content to use that your competitors are under-
utilizing, but that perform well with your audience. The goal of a social
media competitive analysis is to find out how to maximize your social media
strategy, using the knowledge gained from your competitors.
ONGOING COMPETITIVE
ANALYSIS
Building a long-term
strategy for your social
media channels
ONGOING COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Frequency Tracking
It’s important to perform a competitive analysis periodically to ensure Regular tracking will help ensure you have a complete view of the data
your brand is meeting industry standards and projected goals. Many available. At the very least, you’ll want to track the most important metrics:
businesses find that performing a quarterly competitive analysis is audience size and growth rates, total engagement and engagement as
not adequate because of the time-sensitive nature of social media. In a percentage of fans, post types and which post types earn the most
contrast, you may find that you just cannot glean enough information engagement, post cadence and frequency (especially in relation to
from a monthly competitive analysis because of the nature of your engagement), and industry share of voice. These metrics will give you
industry. Whatever frequency you choose, be sure you’re performing insight into your competitors’ performance over time. If that performance
this analysis on a consistent basis. Doing so will allow you to compare should change drastically, you can then perform a more in-depth analysis.
analyses over several time periods, which will give your insights and
recommendations greater depth.
Alerts
Scheduling alerts for industry keywords or influencer mentions can greatly
Depth
reduce the time it takes to collect data. This way, you can keep a bead on
On the subject of depth, it’s important that the data you gather is
what’s going on in your industry, and how your brand and your competitors
detailed enough to help you direct your strategy. Reporting tools like the
are being talked about. You can even schedule alerts that will keep you
Simply Measured Competitive Analysis reports are a great way to get a
abreast of news and events that might spark PR - whether positive or
lot of detailed information in a very short amount of time. However, there
negative - about your company, your competitors, or your industry.
are things that you could also be doing – such as monitoring influencer
conversations in your industry (which you can do with our Conversation
Driver Analysis report). It’s ultimately up to you to determine how deep you
want to go with your analysis.

19 • Ongoing Competitive Analysis

GETTING ANALYZED BY THE COMPETITION
Knowing that there is no limit to what you can learn, you may feel uneasy These tips will help you avoid scenarios like Kodak’s battle with
about how simple it is for your competitors to spy on you. How can you Harold C. Worden.
prevent your competitors from spying on your social media accounts to
Repurposing old content can also help throw your competitors off
improve their own strategy and take advantages of your weaknesses?
track. Chances are you have great pieces of content, pdfs, infographics,
First off, performing regular competitive analyses can really help you webinars, etc., that can be repurposed or reshared to drive awareness and
mitigate much of that problem by just knowing what your competition is engagement with your brand. By consistently pushing out a large variety
doing. Besides that, performing Google searches for your business and of high quality content (instead of only when you have a new product or
your key employees can help you keep an eye on how your business release), you will drive impressions and engagement among your audience,
is perceived. But let’s face it – if you put it out there, information is and flood your competitors’ feeds. In addition share content from others
extremely hard to delete. That’s why it’s important to keep tabs on what that are relevant to your audience’s interest. It can become time consuming
your business and your employees put on social media sites. to rifle through all every social post you’ve made, and you can definitely use
this to your advantage by posting varied content from various sources.
This is not to say you need to spy on your employees, but the alerts
we mentioned earlier can keep you abreast of potential threats to your
online security. In addition, setting down guidelines for your employees or
implementing a nondisclosure agreement provides a policy for how and
when sensitive information can be shared over social media. Doing this
ensures that no information is leaked prior to it’s official release – helping
to keep your competitors in the dark about your plans and strategy.

When taking this approach, be wary of taking too heavy a hand in

regards to your employees’ social media use. You’ll need to balance the
freedoms of your talent, your appreciation of their hard work, and the
need to protect your business. Driving trust and transparency will help
both you and your employees share the stake in your company’s future.

20 • Ongoing Competitive Analysis

Your competitors may try to discredit your brand or products by attempting
to create a negative impression of your business through fear, uncertainty
or doubt. They may point out perceived gaps in your strategy (whether
their assessment is true or not). They may attempt to steal your thunder by
using content you created to drive their own content programs. They will
often use hyperbole to position themselves as a “better” solution – more
comprehensive, more intuitive, the first of its’ kind.

So how do you handle the unethical business of being tarnished by your

competitors? The first step is implementing effective strategy in social
media marketing to share both the breadth and depth of your company’s
CONCLUSION
knowledge. Don’t just be a good choice – become the best choice
Analyzing your competitors is a smart way to stay one step ahead of the
by offering up knowledge, answering industry questions, and openly
game. Performing a SWOT analysis can give you insight into threats to
communicating with your audience. Boost your strategy on networks
your business, and opportunities you should take advantage of. There
your audience uses most to drive better results. Educate any party in
isn’t a whole lot you can do to stop your competitors from analyzing your
your company who is customer facing to answer questions related to a
social media strategies; however, setting out guidelines for employees and
competitor’s negative campaign. Monitor brand mentions with alerts, and
social sharing, and creating great content can help. And when a competitor
know when to openly respond to these campaigns. Remember, fear/
engages in underhanded tactics to negatively impact perception around
uncertainty/doubt campaigns look worse for your competitor (who may
your brand remember to rise above it and answer their scare tactics with
be seen as petty, or who may even drive traffic to your site) than they do
truth and transparency.
for you. Being open and honest about your strengths will help drive trust
among customers and brand advocates. After all, transparency leaves little room for spies.

21 • Ongoing Competitive Analysis

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