Social media has helped in creating strong connections between individuals, businesses, and organizations. But it has also introduced a lot of monitoring activities among rivals to keep watch on various online marketing strategies implemented by their direct competition. These stealthy monitoring activities not only give you vital data related to your competition but also gives an opportunity to better understand your rival's social media marketing strategy. Nowadays almost every business is present on Twitter having their own dedicated team to manage their official account. Arch rivals often restrict themselves in following each others business accounts and prefer to follow opponent's Twitter updates in a stealthy way. Fortunately, there are several ways to follow someone on Twitter without giving them any hint about the same. These methods are easy to implement and doesn't require vast technical knowledge.
Follow Twitter Account RSS Feed
This is one of the most preferred methods of stalking someone on Twitter. To use this method, you don't even need a twitter account. The old Twitter interface used to have a link to RSS feed which was easily accessible from the profile page. But, the new interface is devoid of any RSS link for the public timeline of a given Twitter account. Fortunately, there's an easy way to create an RSS feed for any Twitter account. Here's how to do it.You can use the TwitRSS service to quickly grab the RSS feed for any Twitter account.
Once you get the complete RSS link for the target account, you can import it in any popular feed reader like Google reader to get the latest updates from that user. There are several portable Adobe AIR based feed readers (e.g. Snackr) that continuously checks for new content in any feed and presents them on your desktop in the form of a news ticker. You can use these feed readers to keep an eye on your rival's Twitter account via his RSS feed link.
Create a Private List
This is yet another easy way to follow updates of any Twitter user. You can create a private list to include the desired Twitter handles you want to stalk. Whenever you add any Twitter handle to these private lists, account owners at the other end are never informed about the same. Since these lists are private, nobody else except you can watch the updates through these lists.In case, the person has already blocked you beforehand, you cannot include him in your Twitter private list. Otherwise, this is an excellent weapon in your arsenal to receive updates from multiple Twitter handles in a secure way to keep an eye on them privately. Since the visibility of these lists is limited only to you, you can give whatever name you like to these lists. Professionals almost always use this feature to track all competitors' Twitter accounts in a secure way.
Use Twitter's Advanced Search
This is the simplest and the most flexible method to track updates of any Twitter account. You can either use Twitter's web-based advanced search form, or you can use custom search queries on any 3rd party Twitter client. You can use the following custom queries for keeping an eye on different Twitter accounts. I'll take my own account as an example.from:freshtechtips :)
from:freshtechtips :(
from:freshtechtips ?
from:freshtechtips ? include:retweets -filter:links
Let me explain all these search queries one by one. The first search query will pull all tweets with positive sentiment. The second will pull only those tweets having negative sentiment. The third query will pull only those tweets where I'm asking some question within a tweet. And last but not the least, the fourth query will pull only those tweets in which I'm asking a question and each of these tweets has no links to them. This query will also include retweets posted by me.
Depending on your requirement, you can experiment and can create your own custom search query to get the most relevant tweets from the rival's Twitter account. Again you don't need to sign up for an account to use Twitter's advanced search.
Use Fast Follow Feature
Mobile users who frequently travel around the year can use this handy method to track updates from various accounts without signing up for Twitter. It's called the 'Fast Follow' feature. You simply have to text the following shortcode 'on [username]' to the country-specific number to receive tweets as SMS on your phone. You can also use 'Get [username]' for receiving latest tweets from any user without following them. For example, a mobile user in the US has to text these shortcodes to 40404 to receive latest tweets from any Twitter account. Here's a list of all supported countries and their numbers for using 'Fast Follow' shortcodes on mobile devices.Use Popular Social Media Monitoring Tools
And last but not the least are various Twitter-centric applications created by 3rd party developers to facilitate easy monitoring of Twitter accounts. These applications take the required input from you (Twitter handles) and do the heavy lifting behind the scenes giving you detailed information about those Twitter accounts.Some of these applications are free while others have several paid plans. You can run the trial version of each of these applications and can choose the best one that completely fulfills your needs. If you simply want to read tweets from any account, the 4 methods discussed above are sufficient for it and you don't need a specialized application for that.