Many of us like to compare how we’re doing in our marketing activities with our competitors. It’s a bad habit really, because who’s to say what our competitors are doing is good or bad? However, in the real world, it’s fun to know.
LinkedIn has a nice way to get this sort of data for one particular metric: followers (and new followers) on the site. It allows us to define a set of competitors and then maintains a table for us which we can refer back to for periodic updates. For example, in this (silly) example, I’ve compared us to the big four supermarkets:
If you want to find out a lot more about what LinkedIn provides, there’s a good article called LinkedIn Competitor Analytics: How to Research and Beat Other Company Pages on the Social Media Examiner blog.