Track your competitors on social media for damage control

Some or all of your competitors can be more popular, have a better known brand name, have a bigger PR budget or have a larger funding. As a result they are being mentioned or reviews being written more frequently than about your company or service:
- in blogs
- in micro-posts: tweets (Twitter)
- on Facebook
- in comments
- and on other social media.
You cannot just let this happen, but you need to fight for the attention.

In order to:
- Keep track of your competitors
- Stay up to date
- Act in order to get some of the attention
- Correct incorrect statements
- Raise a different voice and opinion
- Control the damage
You need to search on the social media on the Internet and act.

Instead of using a generic search engine like Google and Bing that retrieves all kinds on Internet information you need to use specific search engines, which provide you all social content preferably in real-time.

Social search engines

Several social search web services are available:
- SocialMention searching Technorati, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Youare, Rejaw, Friendfeed, Jaiku, Brightkite, Diigo, Clipmarks, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Mixx.
- Whostalkin searching Facebook, Friendster, Last.FM, MySpace, Linkedin, Netblog, Ning, bebo, Xanga, hi5, Delicious, Blinklist, Reddit, Metafilter, MyWeb and more.
- Spy searching Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, BackType
- SamePoint searching FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, Twitter, Blogger, Wordpress.com, Diigo, Digg and more.
-VeryRecent searching Twitter, Ask.com Big News, Blog Pulse, Google News, Flickr, Wikio, YouTube, Digg,
Bloglines.
- Yauba This is a generic search engine that allows to specify the media: Real-Time, Blogs, Social Networks, …

We prefer and use SocialMention and Whostalkin.

Using social search for your own benefit

In order to use just enter the name of the company, the service or the product of your competitor or your product and press search.

Blog posts
If you notice a blog post mentioning your competitor, you can post a comment related to the post:
- Indicating an additional benefit or feature of your service.
- Mentioning your service as an alternative.
- Commenting positively or adding interesting information and having the link to your website in your name.

Micro-posts (Tweets on Twitter)
If you notice a Tweet you can reply to the writer in order to draw interest for your service by sending useful information, a benefit or an advantage.

Other media
If you cannot use the same medium to communicate with the author, then send an email to the author in order to draw interest for your service by sending useful information, a benefit or an advantage.

Rules for social reactions

- Don’t claim your service being far better than the service of your competitor.
- Don’t start a negative discussion – stay positive.
- Don’t make any bold claims you cannot realize.
- Don’t post more than once as a reply on the subject – except if someone asks you to reply.
- Stay social.

The main goal is to have your service or your company being mentioned on the same page as your competitor and leaves a positive impression behind.

Do you use social search for getting some of the generated attention?

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