[Case Study] Gathering Competitive Intelligence from Twitter

Once your product is validated and launched, your startup's next great challenge will be growth. If you're still in the discovery phase in search of your ideal customer, you may not know where to start in creating the detailed customer personas you'll need to craft copy, graphics, and products they'll fall in love with.

But what if you could have that information hand-delivered to you -- on a silver platter? We're talking everything: the ideal customer by his/her age, geographical location, profile keywords, most used content hashtags, who influences them -- even their favorite color. Interested?

We thought so.

Beginning with Competitive Social Media Analysis

Have a decent Twitter following for your startup already? You're off to a great start -- but even if you don't, you'll still have a great place from which to pull inspiration: the Twitter followers of your competition. Using tools like Tweepi or Twitter Counter, you'll be able to pull up the stats like the ones below.

Whether or not your audience is large, you can still run a Twitter audit on any profile, divide all the profile's followers into niche communities, and get detailed information on each audience archetype. You'll find their bio keywords, interest affinities, their influencers, and more. You can then use this information to create tailored audiences on Twitter: niched and highly targeted advertising groups which will help you improve your follower count, and ultimately your conversions. We're going to go through case study to show the power this will have in your own business toolkit.

Case Study: What we Learned about Munchery

For this case study, we'll look at the popular food startup Munchery. Looking at the @Munchery Twitter profile, we see the startup has approximately 9,000 followers. With a quick peek at Angel List, we discover Munchery claims to be reinventing the weeknight dinner and has even managed to secure a series B round of funding of $28M. All public information!

One we dig into the social media analysis with the previously mentioned tools, we learn even more:

Munchery's Klout

A number between 1-100, a Klout score measures social influence across all social channels.

At 69 Klout, Munchery is an influencer - and you'll be able to see the categories they focus on here.

Top Follower Profile Keywords

This search pulls information on the way Munchery's audience describes itself on their own bios, which may help you with your own ad campaign targeting.

Their top 6 follower profile keywords are:
  1. Food – 10.6%
  2. Tech – 6.3%
  3. Life – 4.8%
  4. Lover – 4.6%
  5. Founder – 4.0%
  6. Marketing – 3.9%





Most Talked About in Munchery's Network
  1. Food
  2. Photography
  3. Social Media
  4. Politics
  5. Technology
  6. Music
  7. Video
  8. Barack Obama







Munchery’s Top Tribe Influencers based on follower size are:
  1. @benlandis
  2. @verified
  3. @DJMany
  4. @LILBTHEBASEDGOD
  5. @Pappychris1
  6. @JonahLupton





This technique works on any Twitter profile in any vertical!

All this information can be used to find your own audience, and with some ad optimization and style changes in your own tweets, you'll be able to grow your own audience off the work done by your competitors.

Had luck finding your first buyers this way? Let us know in the comments!