Knowing Your Competition By Brenda Williams At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

When it comes to having “good business sense,” nothing seems to be more important than knowing what your competition is up to. For instance, if you run an automobile dealership and you know that there is another automobile dealership across the street or down the block, you may want to stop by after hours to check out their stock of vehicles and take note of the pricing, etc. This isn't to be confused with spying, which is something entirely different. Rather, by keeping yourself informed as to what your competitor is doing, it can help to benefit you. Another example of what I mean may lie in the fact that for weeks you may go by without a single sale. You think that you're pricing your vehicles at the right cost. However, one day you overhear one of your potential clients talking about how the prices are so much lower at the other dealership down the road. It is a situation like this that makes you think about your competition and whether or not you are doing everything that you can to maximize your business.

Knowing your competition (whether for business or for personal reasons) makes you more informed, and the more informed you are, the wiser decisions you should (hypothetically) be able to make. If you look at anyone who is even remotely successful, you'll usually find out that it took hard work as well as some prowess to make things happen. Unfortunately, in the business world, you cannot afford to sit back and let things happen naturally. Instead, you must forge ahead and be able to infer what other people are going to do.

Nowhere else is it more important to know what the competition is doing than on the Internet. With the sheer volume of people who surf the Internet, not to mention conduct business and personal matters on the web, it suddenly becomes that much more important for you to know what the latest trends are not to mention observing how other people design and implement their websites. When it comes to the Internet, a great way to see what the competition is doing is by joining various social networks. For instance, the hottest social network/microblogging service is Twitter. The interesting thing that has happened with Twitter is that there really is a good mix of everyday usage as well as a growing number of business owners who are mingling with the public by creating Twitter pages for their business in an effort to more effectively market themselves. And it's working!

Twitter is no longer just about sending out tweets to your friends. On the larger scale, if someone doesn't like a product or service, they can instantly send out a message to the world about it, and depending on how many followers you have the review that you put out there (remember that it has to be 140 characters or less) can have wondrous or equally devastating effects for a business. Look at how other people market themselves on Twitter and other social networks. Does it appear like all they care about is their bottom line, or are they actually trying to make genuine connections?

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