To be successful on Twitter – whether you’re tweeting on behalf of a major brand, a small business, or yourself – requires a well-thought-out content strategy.

Why are you tweeting? When are you tweeting? To whom? How will you measure success?

Even when you’ve crafted that solid tweeting strategy – committing to practicing great social customer service, pushing out high-quality content, and pulling in new followers with engaging tweets – success may still be beyond reach.

And here’s the one reason why.

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Any good social media strategy goes beyond what your brand does, and takes a look at what your competitors are up to. When it comes to finding success on Twitter, it’s all well and good to map out your content strategy and metrics, but in order to really excel you’ll have to incorporate serious, on-going competitor analysis into your plan.

There are plenty of tools out there that can help you do this. They’ll measure your brand’s share of voice, how engaged your competitor’s audience is, the sentiment surrounding your competitor’s tweets… but most of them cost a pretty penny – which many small and medium businesses simply don’t have.

If you’d still like to take a look at what the competition is doing on Twitter, but you don’t want to spend a ton on monthly or annual software subscriptions, we’ve put together some strategies you can use – for free.
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There’s no such thing as “better than” or “worse than” when comparing social media platforms.

Each one serves different purposes and is more effective at certain things. Each one has different impact and influence in different areas.

But certainly, there are points of comparison worth considering in evaluating daily time spent on social media. There are only so many minutes in an hour, and only so much time saved by social media aggregator tools like HootSuite, CoTweet and TweetDeck.

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Social media data analysis company Attention dug into the Twitter data for the Occupy Wall Street protests, and shows just how massive the movement has become.
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