Social Media Competitor Analysis: An Easy-to-Follow Guide

Table Of Content

Table of Contents

Social media has made competitor research unusually transparent. You don’t have to guess what other brands are talking about, how frequently they’re publishing or what kind of content attracts attention. Much of it is readily available to the public.

But visibility doesn’t automatically make analysis easy.

A competitor with 300,000 followers may have less meaningful engagement than one with 30,000. What’s more, a thousand people may have liked your latest post, but does it really tell you anything useful about what drives your customers to take action?  And a content format that works brilliantly for one brand might fail spectacularly for another.

A competitor analysis only works out when you connect those dots. You want to understand not only what your competitors are doing, but what their activity reveals about audience interests, content gaps and opportunities for your own brand.

What Is Social Media Competitor Analysis?

A social media competitor analysis refers to researching the activity of competitors on social media, then comparing this data against your own strategy. This might include looking at which platforms they’re using, types of content they publish, frequency of posts and responses from their audience and ultimately, how they position their brand.

The important part is what happens after you collect the information. The goal isn’t to build a spreadsheet full of numbers. It’s to spot patterns that can help you make better decisions about your own social media content.

How to Choose Competitors for Social Media Analysis

You don’t have to keep tabs on all the brands in your industry for this to work. In fact, three to five relevant competitors will be more than enough for a solid competitor analysis.

Look at direct competitors first. These are brands offering similar products or services to the same audience. Then consider indirect competitors, which may offer something different but still solve the same customer problem. You can also pick one aspirational competitor, a brand you don’t directly compete against, but has a great social media presence you can take inspiration from. 

And don’t automatically go for the brands with the biggest follower counts. A smaller competitor with an active audience and strong engagement can tell you far more about what works in your market than a huge brand targeting a completely different audience.

How to Conduct a Social Media Competitor Analysis

1. Identify Where Each Competitor Is Active

 The first step towards conducting your social media competitor analysis is identifying which platforms they’re currently active on.  Check Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, X or any other platform that matters to your industry.

That said, you don’t necessarily need to analyze all of them. Just make note of the platforms they are posting the most actively on, as well as the ones where they get significant amounts of engagement.

For example, if a competitor has an Instagram account but barely posts there, while their LinkedIn content regularly sparks conversations, that’s worth noticing.

2. Record Your Competitors’ Basic Social Media Metrics

Once you have your competitors, record a few basic numbers. For each account, we want to know:

– Follower count

– Follower growth rate

– Post frequency 

– Average number of likes and comments

– average number of views/reach

These will give you good insights into how successfully their social media strategies are paying off. 

A competitor with 200,000 followers might seem to be doing very well, until you find that almost all of their posts only get a few hundred likes and comments. Another competitor with half the number of followers might still get a far stronger response from their audience.

3. Analyse The Content of Your Competitors

Once you have all these basics sorted out, begin your analysis of their content strategy.

Pay attention to what topics they focus on most frequently and how they cover those topics.

For instance, one competitor might predominantly set out to answer customer’s questions with useful tips while another may mainly focus on showcasing products, offers and promotional posts.

Their strongest posts can tell you even more. If a competitor regularly gets more engagement on product demonstrations than product photos, or gets more shares from practical tips than promotional content, there’s a useful pattern to notice. Look at several of their better-performing posts rather than judging the strategy from one viral post.

It’s also worth noticing what competitors rarely talk about to find content gaps. Its possible that every single competitor in your market may routinely cover about the same three or four topics over and over again. 

By focusing on covering subject areas that haven’t been covered yet, or providing alternative angles on those that are already covered, you can make your brand stand out. 

4. Analyse Their Engagement Properly

While Likes might be easy to track for you, there’s always more to learn by digging into comments, shares, saves, views, and all the other engagement data you have access to.

For example, a post with fewer likes but a large number of shares or saves, it could indicate that you’re delivering something valuable to your audience.

Engagement rate can also give you more context than follower count alone. Just remember that engagement rates can be calculated in different ways, so use the same method when comparing competitors.

5. Study Your Competitors’ Audience 

Nothing gives you better insight into how effective your competitors’ communications strategies truly are than their audience itself.

Read the comments. What questions keep appearing? What do people complain about? What features do they ask for? What do they praise? Which posts start actual conversations?

These comments can reveal customer concerns that aren’t obvious from the brand’s content itself.

6. Analyse Your Competitors’ Positioning and Brand Voice

Every brand needs a unique identity within today’s marketplace environment. Yet having a truly authentic voice requires careful consideration of how each competitor presents itself.

What do they want to be known for? Do they position themselves as affordable, premium, practical, innovative, expert or something else? How do they speak to their audience?

Pay attention to the language they use as well as the subjects they talk about. One brand might sound highly technical, while another keeps everything simple and conversational.

This helps you understand not just what competitors are posting, but how they are trying to occupy a place in the customer’s mind.

7. Look at Campaigns and Collaborations

Go beyond regular posts and look at their bigger social activities.

Check out their bigger social initiatives too. For example, are they working with influencers or creators, using user generated content, hosting giveaways, launching products, working with other brands or creating seasonal campaigns.

And then you analyze the response. If people engage with the campaign. If it leads to conversions and shares. 

The purpose of this is to understand which approaches are giving your competitors better results.

How to Turn Your Findings Into a Social Media Strategy

After you’re finished with the analysis, you have to turn your findings into actionable steps. 

Take note of everything: what they are doing particularly well. What their audience appears to be responding to. And what the gaps are. 

For example, if several competitors get strong engagement from how-to videos, look at the topics and questions behind those posts. You could then test similar content around problems your own brand can genuinely help with.

The same applies to content gaps. If customers keep asking questions that competitors rarely answer, those questions can become content ideas. Test a few of these topics and formats, then use your own engagement, shares, saves, views or clicks to decide what is worth doing more of.

This competitor research is used to guide your strategy, but your brand’s unique approach remains at the centre.

How Often Should You Do a Social Media Competitor Analysis?

A deeper competitor analysis every quarter is enough for most brands. You can then do lighter checks during the month to keep up with major campaigns, new content formats, changes in positioning or sudden shifts in audience response.

There’s no need to rebuild your strategy every time a competitor posts something that performs well. Social media moves quickly, but individual posts don’t always represent a lasting trend.

Look for patterns over time. That’s where the useful information is.

Use Competitor Analysis to Elevate Your Social Media

Good competitor research can also tell you something about your market that your own analytics can’t. You may discover that customers are responding to a type of content your team never considered, that a competitor has built a strong presence around a very specific subject, or that there’s space for a completely different point of view.

It also gives you better insights about your own social media performance. Let’s say a post receives 500 likes. It means very little on its own. But understanding how other posts from similar brands perform can help put things in better context.

A well conducted competitor analysis gives you a clear picture of where your brand stands as well as where there might be room for improvement.

Want a closer look at what your competitors are doing on social media? Biztalbox offers social media competitor analysis to help you understand competitor performance, content patterns and opportunities for your brand.