Your competitors are on Twitter and they are very active. Good to know but is their strategy really effective? Difficult to know because normally you have not enough time to constantly monitor more than a couple of them. A good market analysis strategy is to read their posts in a certain period of time but Twitter doesn’t keep this easy because you have to spend hours to expand their tweets before have a good view of what information your competitors wrote. Moreover, Twitter allows you to view only the last 3,200 tweets. For this reason I normally use Twitter XL. This online free service allows you to catch and save the last 3,200 tweets just inserting the Twitter name and click on Get Tweets. After a bunch of seconds (or, more often, some minutes) you will have a complete list including the last 3,200 tweets  (retweets included) and you can export them in a CSV format. This file can be imported in a spreadsheet (e.g. OpenOffice) and clearly visualized. If you really know what you are looking for, you have a terrific picture about timing, source, contents and trends of the competitor you are monitoring. Not only you can discover when and about what your competitor is more active but you will also know if he/she is using some particular online service to tweet. This data mining tool is recommended for business or just for fun if you are a meddler.