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Comment by RBr | Hacker News Reader

Passively assimilating the people who follow your competitors isn't a bad idea.

However, you can quickly target people who evangelize your competitors by tracking which of those followers who re-tweet and follow competitors on other social networks.

Those are really the users that you want. Identify them and give them a reason to get behind you.

Mass following any group of people on any social network won't increase your reach. Targeting specific groups of users, identifying what they want and giving that to them will.

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to do this, try:

- going to http://twitya.com

- enter competitor's twitter account, hit return

- see which users are replying or mentioning the competitor

- enter into a conversation with each one

- if they won't use or try your product, they might at least follow you if you give good reason, and are courteous.

- also see the friends of the competitor that you can follow too

- read the competitor's tweets

Or just build your own. It's super easy with the API's and can be customized with much better search-and-match rules than anything out in the wild.

Some of my personal favorite stats are to watch people who RT more than once over a set time period about the competition.

"Like terms" is also handy because then you can add terms that are directly related but not identical to your competitor.

I'm sure that the big brand folks are already doing this and that there are paid tools ... but on a smaller scale, it's fast and easy to whip this sort of monitoring up.

The hard part is figuring out what these people want. You really need to have an insight into the weaknesses of your competition to accomplish that.

I mentioned Twitya cos I built it :) What you mention sounds great, and you could also run some twitter searches and subscribe to their feeds. The Twitter ecosystem is so rich, and there'd be crossover involved between different apps, and apps are being improved and new ones released continuously, with this itself a big problem.

"Passively assimilating the people who follow your competitors isn't a bad idea."

Good idea. You can get this information from the (un)follow feed from http://rssfriends.com (here you're also getting users unfollowing, which can be noise, although I think there's an unlisted feed that doesn't show this.)

You can also get another feed of those an account starts to follow.

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