Articles

August 2010

As the most popular professionally-geared social media platform, it’s no surprise that LinkedIn provides a wealth of information about companies. In this series, we will highlight useful tactics for finding competitor intelligence using LinkedIn. These are a few of our favorite tips for using company profiles to obtain better information about your competition.

Analyze Employee Changes

On each company profile page, there is a section that displays recent employee changes. It includes the name, job title, and often a link to the individual profile of any employee who has recently changed his/her employment information. In some cases, the stats about each individual are of little value in terms of competitor intelligence-- but from a trending perspective, these actions (new hires, promotions, departures, etc.) can all signify trends happening within the operations of your competitor. Go to your competitor’s profile and click the Activity tab. This will display all recent employment changes—not just the highlights on the main company page. Having this data neatly compiled in one location makes it easy to view potential hiring initiatives, departmental layoffs, movement into new markets, and utilization of new technologies or business approaches. If you can compile the isolated employment events into a bigger picture, you will have a better idea about the strategic expansions and reductions your competition is making.

View Related Companies

In the Related Companies section within each company profile on LinkedIn, there are highlighted sub-sections for various types of relationships. Once these business relationships are illuminated, doing supplemental research can build a better understanding more about your competitor’s alliances, strategy, and positioning within your market space. The most common connections “types” are recruiting relationships with firms or universities, suppliers/resellers, and major customers or vendors. The Related Companies section also provides links to subsidiaries and acquired companies. This makes LinkedIn an effective tool to quickly understand your competitor’s organizational structure.

Analyze Jobs Openings

LinkedIn attaches job listings posted by the company to the profile in a separate tab, but they are easily accessible to anyone with a LinkedIn profile. Analyzing the job postings from your competitor provides insight into its talent management and development strategy. Keep an eye out for job listings that may signify specific hiring initiatives, movement into new geographical markets, or a developing reliance on new technologies and skills. This information-gathering tactic can be easily transferred to other job listing sites as well.

Employee Demographics

The employee demographic data provided by LinkedIn is a great supplementary tool to make better assessments about your competitor. The most obvious competitor intelligence often comes from the numbers of employees (who are on LinkedIn) at each office location. Use this data to develop a general idea about the size of each branch. Keep these conclusions very general because all of the employee data on LinkedIn will be skewed toward the stats for the most typical LinkedIn users and probably won’t be a completely accurate representation of the real numbers. Despite this limitation, LinkedIn still provides a useful data that can help build a more complete competitive profile of the targeted company.

To find additional tips for gaining information for competitor intelligence from individual profiles on LinkedIn, check out another article in this series, “Competitor Intelligence from LinkedIn: Tips for Gaining Insight from Individual Profiles.”