Every day, social media users share hundreds of millions of Tweets, Facebook messages, and other content across a variety of social networks. All of this content is a potential source of information about your customers and your competitors, but how do you pick out the data that really matters to your business and make use of it? The answer is social media intelligence.

1. GUIDE
Customer
and Competitor
Intelligence
Best Practices and Time Saving Tactics

2. 2CUSTOMER AND COMPETITOR INTELLIGENCE
Customer and
Competitor Intelligence
Best Practices and Time Saving Tactics
Gathering Intelligence from
Social Media
Every day, social media users share hundreds of millions
of Tweets, Facebook messages, and other content
across a variety of social networks. All of this content is
a potential source of information about your customers
and your competitors, but how do you pick out the data
that really matters to your business and make use of it?
The answer is social media intelligence.
What is social media intelligence?
Social media intelligence is simply the practice of
gathering information from social media and making
sense of it. It involves taking data from Twitter,
Facebook, and other social networks and transforming
it into knowledge that can be easily understood and
acted upon. The good news for your business is that
social media intelligence doesn’t need to be complicated
or time consuming, and you don’t need to wear a lab
coat to take advantage of it. It’s about answering some
important questions, such as:
‹‹ Who are your customers, and how can you reach
them?
‹‹ What do your customers want?
‹‹ What do people think about your company and your
competitors?
‹‹ Who is influencing your customers, and what are
they saying?
‹‹ What are your competitors doing?
Your Hootsuite account has features that can help
you start gathering valuable information about your
customers and competitors, so you can make better
decisions that will boost your bottom line. This guide
outlines best practices for saving time and staying
focused while gathering intelligence on social media.
Intelligence Best Practices
Listen to the conversations that matter
Real-time listening is the foundation of good social
media intelligence. It begins with monitoring your
brand mentions on Twitter and the comments on your
Facebook Page, but it shouldn’t end there. Thanks to the
transparency of social media, you can listen to relevant
conversations that are occurring all over the world
about your business, your industry, your competitors,
and other subjects relevant to your business.
One of the most effective social listening methods is to
create customized Twitter searches and save them as
streams in your Hootsuite dashboard, such as hashtags,
the names of your products, and your brand name, in
case people are not @mentioning you directly. These
streams can be further modified to only deliver
Tweets:
‹‹ in certain languages
‹‹ from particular Twitter accounts
‹‹ near specific locations
‹‹ with a positive or negative attitude
Twitter search streams can help you discover loyal
customers, brand advocates, sales leads, new
competitors, influencers, and other people that
you’ll want to observe on an ongoing basis. However,
following everyone in a single Home Feed makes it
difficult to keep track and keep up. To organize people
into manageable groups, we highly recommend adding
them to Twitter Lists. You can then monitor these
groups separately by adding Twitter List streams to the
your Hootsuite dashboard.

3. 3CUSTOMER AND COMPETITOR INTELLIGENCE
Twitter List streams allow you to:
‹‹ observe competitors’ conversations with customers
‹‹ sort contacts into various market segments based on
location, prospects, etc
‹‹ monitor loyal customers and brand advocates to
help gather feedback and stay connected
Identify your audience
As you grow your audience on social media, it’s critical
to understand who your followers are. Identifying the
key demographic and geographic characteristics of your
audience will allow you to craft more effective messaging
and content.
Use Facebook Insights to gain a detailed overview
of your Facebook audience, including geographic
information, age, and gender.
We also recommend the Demographics Pro for Twitter
app in the Hootsuite App Directory to analyze your
Twitter audience demographics.
Monitor customer sentiment
Shifts in attitude on social media can reveal key business
risks and opportunities. With social listening, you can
keep an ear to the ground and hear the individual voices
of your customers. To gain a broader perspective of how
your customers feel, you can complement this ongoing
monitoring with sentiment analysis in periodic reports.
Sentiment analysis allows you to visualize the emotions
related to a particular keyword, giving you a quick
overview of attitudes toward your product, your business,
or your competitors. Use Hootsuite Analytics reports to
track sentiment on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Gain insights into content and
influencers
Knowing which ideas and people are driving your
customers’ conversations will help you cut through
the noise and reach them with your own messaging.
Therefore, understanding content trends and
influencers should be a key aspect of your customer
intelligence strategy.
Measuring your own content’s performance is a good
place to start. To find out what types of content are
piquing your customers’ interest, you can measure not
only likes, shares, and retweets, but also how many
people are clicking on the links in your social messages.
We recommend using Hootsuite to shrink links to
trackable Ow.ly links when publishing. This will allow
you to see which social media posts are motivating
your audience to take action and click through to your
website. Ow.ly links are also shorter, which frees up
space to write longer Tweets.
Learn more: What are URL Shorteners?
“Hootsuite allows us to get a great
bird’s eye view of all the social
networks, conversations, and content
that revolve around our brand and
customers.”
Heather Harmon, Public Relations Manager, Manta
$$

4. 4CUSTOMER AND COMPETITOR INTELLIGENCE
How to use Hootsuite to Gather Intelligence
How to use Twitter search streams
1. You can add Twitter search streams to any tab in
your Hootsuite dashboard. Similar to folders on your
computer, tabs help separate and categorize your
streams into unique spaces for easier viewing.
2. To create a Twitter search stream, click the “Add
Stream” button near the top of a tab and then select
“Search” from the available Twitter streams.
3. Select a Twitter profile to conduct your search with
(this will not affect your search results). For ideas on
how to set up a search query, click “Show Examples”.
Learn more: How to organize your dashboard for
listening with tabs and streams
How to monitor Twitter by location
Set up geo-filtered Twitter streams
1. In your dashboard, locate the search icon
(magnifying glass) in the upper righthand corner.
2. Enter your search term in the Twitter search field.
3. Click the crosshairs icon on the right side of the
search field to find local search results.
4. The Twitter search stream will automatically refresh
showing local search results within a 25 km radius
from your current location.
5. To change the radius of your search, open the
dropdown menu at the top of your stream and
click “preferences”. From there you will be able
to manually adjust the radius as well as the GPS
coordinates to focus your search.
Use the Hootlet for Chrome with Google Maps
The Hootlet, Hootsuite’s extension for the Chrome web
browser, makes it even easier to find Tweets near a
particular location by using Google Maps.
1. Simply highlight a location in Google Maps and click
on the link, “Tweets near here”.
2. This will bring up a stream of Tweets from people
nearby. You can adjust the geographic radius of your
search, and even respond to Tweets directly from
Google Maps through your Hootsuite account.
3. If you would like to save the stream for easy access
in the future, click “Add to Hootsuite”.
How to use Twitter Lists
There are two kinds of Twitter Lists: public and private.
When you add someone to a public list, they’ll receive a
notification and be publicly viewable, so if you would like
to create a list that only you can access, use a private
list. You don’t need to follow someone to add them to a
Twitter List.
Learn more: Managing and monitoring Twitter
Lists in Hootsuite
“We use Hootsuite to monitor
customers mentioning us within a
certain distance. We use geo-located
searches to target our UK and NYC
customer-base.”
Kenneth Westling, Online Marketing Specialist, Five Guys

5. 5CUSTOMER AND COMPETITOR INTELLIGENCE
For more help using Hootsuite Analytics, check out
these resources from our Social Media Coaches:
GUIDE:
Social Analytics – Measure Your Social Media
Success
LIVE WEBINAR:
Essential Social Media Analytics
How to use Analytics reports
Hootsuite Analytics reports can easily be customized to
include key social media metrics about your customers
and competitors. Create reports that meet your unique
requirements and share the results with your entire
organization.
1. To manage Hootsuite reports, bring up the Analytics
tab by clicking on the chart icon on the left-hand
navigation bar.
2. From here you can edit your existing reports,
generate new ones from templates, or create a
report from the ground up by clicking “Build Custom
Report”.
Here are some of the most useful report modules for
intelligence gathering:
Twitter
Twitter Sentiment: Analyze the conversational tone
around a particular keyword on Twitter. See at a glance
which emotions are dominating the conversation about
your brand, products, and competitors.
Compare Keywords: Compare how frequently
different keywords are used on Twitter over time. Use
this module to compare share of voice against your
competitors,
Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights modules give you a comprehensive
view of your Facebook audience, so you can see which
segments of your customer base are most engaged
with your brand. The following metrics can all be broken
down by demographic groups (gender and age bracket)
and by geographic regions, depending on which
modules you select:
Likes: The number of people who liked your Facebook
page
Reach: The number of people who saw any content
about your page
People Talking about This: The number of people who
talked about your page
To see how your Facebook Page stacks up against your
competitors, use the Compare Public Pages module.
Ow.ly
View click statistics for all your Ow.ly shortened links,
including total link clicks per day, clicks by region, and
the most popular links. See which content is driving
the most clicks so you can refine your messaging and
content strategy.

6. 6CUSTOMER AND COMPETITOR INTELLIGENCE
How to use the Hootsuite App Directory
The Hootsuite App Directory allows you to customize
Hootsuite by bringing additional services and social
networks into your dashboard. Many of these apps
can be used to gather deeper and broader intelligence
about your customers and competitors. There are more
than 100 apps in the Hootsuite App Directory; some of
them are free, and some of them are paid. Here are a
few to get you started:
Demographics Pro for Twitter
Analyze the demographics of your Twitter audience,
including gender ratio, average income, brand
affiliations, and geographic locations. Compare your
Twitter audience to your competitors’ to see who’s
attracting your target demographic most effectively.
Riffle
Get to know anyone on Twitter instantly, from their top
interests and affinities to the type of mobile phone they
use. Discover their accounts on other social networks
and see their Twitter usage patterns at a glance.
ReviewInc
The ReviewInc app makes it easy to track all of your
online reviews across multiple review sites such as
Yelp, Google Reviews, OpenTable, and more, all from
a single stream. See what customers are saying about
your business and stay on top of your reputation. If
your business has multiple locations, you can create a
separate stream for each of them.
Nexalogy
Use the Nexalogy app to discover trending and
emerging discussions based on your Twitter account or
a hashtag/search term. Find out what content and ideas
are driving conversations among your customers and in
your industry.
Survey Monkey
Survey Monkey is a popular online survey and
questionnaire tool that can help your business conduct
market and customer research. With the Survey Monkey
app integration for Hootsuite, you can view detailed
survey summaries and easily share your surveys to
social networks.
PeerIndex PiQ
A critical component of social media intelligence
is understanding who influences whom. With the
PeerIndex PiQ app, you can quickly identify which
people are influencing—and being influenced by—your
customers and competitors on Twitter.
Vidpiq for Instagram
This app enables you to Monitor posts on Instagram by
location, hashtag or username. Listen to what people
are saying about you and your competitors, and see
every Instagram post near the places that are relevant
to your business and your customers.
For more information, take a look
at these helpful resources:
Blog Post: How to Use Social Media Intelligence
Blog Post: 3 Ways to Use Social Media to ‘Listen’
to the Competition
Blog Post: Social Media Monitoring: Your Biggest
Missed Opportunity?
Blog Post: Twitter Lists are the New “Follow”
Blog Post: #HootTip: Geo-Located Search
Blog Post: Adding Tabs and Streams to your
Hootsuite Dashboard
Video: How to Monitor Keyword and Search
Streams in Hootsuite
Video: How to Measure Social Media
Engagement & Understand Analytics
For further Hootsuite onboarding and
training, follow @HootsuitePro and check
out our webinars page