Yesterday we discussed Five Wickedly Clever Ways to Use Twitter. For those of you who missed it, #1 was customer service and #2 was stealing the competition's business.

Today we're going to go into detail about the latter of those two clever twitter uses and discuss how exactly to use Twitter to poach the competition's customers.

Twitter is a paradigm shift for customer service in the sense that previously, when customers complained about a company, they typically complained directly to that company, or privately to friends and colleagues. Twitter gives unsatisfied customers the ability to complain to the world in general, and gives you the unique ability to quickly and easily poach customers away from the competition.

It's a pretty simple process.

1. Identify your competition's unsatisfied customers.

This is probably the most important step to stealing away your competition's unsatisfied customers with Twitter. The first thing you have to do is find them, and Twitter's search features are the perfect avenue to doing that. You'll want to run real-time searches using a Twitter client like Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop. Both of these clients allow you to view a constantly-updated stream of all of the tweets containing a search query. You'll want to type your competition's names (as well as any slang that your competition's unsatisfied customers might use, like "Comcrap" or "Microsuck," for example) as search queries, and immediately you'll start to see a stream of tweets about your competition. Monitor that stream closely and you'll quickly be able to identify which customers are unsatisfied, and why.

2. Make contact with your competition's unsatisfied customers.

Step 2 is to make contact with the customers you've identified in step 1. There aren't a huge number of ways to do this - the most direct way is to send them an @reply. You'll want to decide on a strategy ahead of time - either clearly identify yourself as working for a competing company or play it more subtly, acting the part of a similarly unsatisfied customer. How you choose to promote your company or service is up to you - a good piece of advice is to keep it simple and tweet a URL that gives your pitch in more detail.

3. Consider using a promotional code

One of the best ways to sway customers over from the competition is to use some kind of promotion to encourage them to leave; although they may be unsatisfied with their current company or service provider, they won't necessarily be willing to make the switch unless you give them some encouragement - and a promotional code offering some sort of discount can be a great way to do that. An added bonus is that promotional codes can be used to track the effectiveness of your Twitter-based promotions.

4. Do Pro-Active Customer Service to Prevent the Competition from Hitting Back

If you lose an unsatisfied customer for every unsatisfied customer you poach from the competition, you're breaking even. You'll want to make sure that you're pro-actively doing Twitter-based customer service to make sure that the competition doesn't get the opportunity to pull the same tricks on you. Cover your bases by keeping your customers happy and take advantage of your competition's failure to do so.

However you choose to go about it, using Twitter to identify and poach the competition's unsatisfied customers can be one of the most lucrative of all the uses of Twitter, particularly when it comes to service-based companies like web hosting providers or telecommunications companies. As long as your competition doesn't use Twitter for customer service, you've got an opportunity to move in and use their weaknesses to your advantage.

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and start poaching!