Newsle
If you’re looking for a way to track what your competitors are doing, Newsle is a great web service. The website pulls contact information from your LinkedIn account to determine what they are doing on the Internet. Any articles that mention the person’s name will be archived in a summary page. You can even opt for email notifications, which will let you know when something new is posted about (or by) the person you are researching.
This lets you discreetly know what your competitors are up to, so you can always one-up their offers or add new features to your services that they haven’t thought about.
MSN Money
Another free tool is MSN Money (formerly Bing Finance), which comes with Windows 8. It essentially does the same thing as Newsle, but it tends to pull articles from a variety of different news sources, finance blogs, and major newspapers worldwide. MSN Money provides users with a market view of various stock performance, news, and financial performance. It even has a way of comparing different companies within the same industry.
Glassdoor
If you want a clear view of the outside world, Glassdoor is a great app for both iOS and Android operating systems. It was originally designed for job seekers, but it lets you see salary information and reviews of employers. You can get a good idea of what your competitors do for their employees, and one-up them to prevent your talent from being poached. And if your team feels good about your company, they’ll have more desire to see you succeed over the others.
Feedly RSS Reader
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a way of taking multiple blog streams and putting them into one. It’s a way to keep track of multiple blogs without the annoyance of visiting each blog. Feedly is a tool that lets you view a summary of the blog post before wasting time judging whether it is something of importance. You’ll be able to follow trends within your industry.
CrunchBase
With a free web application and mobile apps available, CrunchBase is an ideal research tool to follow tech companies, products, and services from all sorts of different backgrounds and areas. CrunchBase will also list products and contact information for any companies that pop up in the search feed.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a handy tool that tells you whenever Google detects a new piece of content about a particular subject on the Internet. You can set up alerts for your own company, your competitors, and even your own name and get email notifications when a new article is found online.
It’s always good to know a little bit about the competition. Do you have any tips or apps you’d like to share in the comments?