How I use Slack to Track my Competitors
So, I’m sure you’ve all heard about Slack, who became a $2.8 billion company in less than 2 years and now has 1.7 million DAU (Daily Active Users). I’ve been using Slack for almost a year now and I wanted to share one of the many ways I use this awesome tool.
There are lots of articles about how to use Slack for team collaboration, infrastructure monitoring, and project management, but I want to share a totally different use-case, this time as a BizDev and Strategy tool: How to track your competitors using Slack.
To be honest, I’ve always found it hassle to track my competitors. On one hand, you don’t want to invest too much time on it (there are more important things to do when you’re in early stages) and on the other hand, it’s important to understand your competitor’s point of view, go to market strategy and value prop.
Following your competitors would usually include setting up Google Alerts, follow their social activity, check their website every now and then, identify their customers, etc. I’ve put together a list of 4 useful tools that you can use for free and the way that I integrated them into Slack, creating the ultimate competitor’s tracking dashboard. For these examples, I’ll use Evernote as my competitor.
1. Setting up Google Alerts
Google Alerts is one of the first tools you should set up when you wish to track a new potential competitor. In this case, we’d like to get all alerts regarding Evernote straight into a specific Slack channel, in my example it would be the ‘evernote’ channel. In order to do so, you’d need to set up Google Alerts to deliver all the alerts to RSS feed.
Then you should use the RSS link created by Google and subscribe to it using the Slack RSS Integration. There’s a quick way to do that: Go to the desired channel on Slack and type /feed subscribe INSERT_THE_RSS_URL_HERE.
That’s it, your Google alerts will start appearing on your channel immediately.
Cool fact: you can subscribe multiple RSS feeds into the same Slack channel.
2. Follow Twitter Activity
Slack has a great built-in integration with Twitter which allows you to automatically get tweets that are sent to/from any Twitter account directly to a specific channel. In our case, I’ll set Slack to display any tweet that was sent to/from @evernote. I’ll do this by adding a Twitter integration from the ‘Configure Integrations’ window.
After adding the Twitter integration to your Slack account, you’ll have to authenticate your Twitter account with Slack and set up a few simple tracking properties.
I also decided to follow Phil Libin (@plibin), Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Evernote which might give me an additional point of view about the company. In order to do so, I just repeated the steps as described above.
There is one thing though that the Slack integration with twitter doesn’t support and that is hashtags tracking. In order to get relevant hashtags into your feed, you can use a custom script like this one (no developer’s skills needed) and then subscribe to its RSS feed (just like we did with Google Alerts).
3. Track Website for Changes
Following competitor’s website for changes can tell a lot about their value proposition, market segment, pricing strategy and product direction. There are tons of great services that allow you to automatically track a web page and get notified of every minor change that has been made. I personally use the good old ChangeDetection since it’s free, simple and very accurate. Once you set up an alert you can get an RSS feed and add it to your Slack channel. Keep in mind that you need to set up alerts for each web page separately. I recommend tracking not only the obvious main and product pages but also pages like Pricing and Jobs which might give you deeper insights about your competitor’s plans. For example, position openings can indicate what their product focus is as well as global expansion plans.
4. Subscribe to YouTube Channel
Get notified whenever your competitor uploads a new video on YouTube. Whether it is a product overview, a marketing clip or a recent interview with the CEO, you should know about it.
To do so, you first need to subscribe to the channel on YouTube (just click the Subscribe button wherever you see it). After subscribing to the channel we would like to get RSS feed of the notifications. Unfortunately, YouTube shut down this option a long time ago so we will do it manually, just use the following URL: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=XXXXXXXXXX. This post explains how to find the Channel ID.
These are just a few examples of how to use Slack as an intelligence dashboard with a feed of all of your competitors’ activity. In this post I picked only free tools that best fit early stages companies, you can use any other tools that provide you with RSS feed or API and add them to your Slack channels, creating a real-time competitors dashboard that can be shared with your team.
Do you use any other interesting tools or tricks to track your competitors? I’d love to hear about it.
