Social media competitor analysis is a key step in developing your own strategy and learning from the mistakes and successes of others.

No matter how big or small your business is, it's always worth keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing on social media.

After all, you could have created a great marketing campaign that doesn't make an impact because it's too similar to what others in your industry are doing. Or you could be making the same mistakes as a competitor when it comes to handling complaints on social platforms.

Analyzing your competitors isn't just about watching their likes, shares, and interactions from afar. If you are serious about developing a successful online strategy, you need to conduct a deep social media competitive analysis.

It's about being proactive, not passive.

This guide will show you how. From identifying whom to monitor, to analyzing your competitors' social media presence, to applying those insights to your own social strategy.

Competitive analysis done the right way

Our guide is designed to show you the right way to conduct smart, ethical competitive analysis. There's no need to be sneaky when it comes to looking at the weaknesses and successes of a competitor's social media marketing efforts.

All you need is access to the right tools that track publicly available data points and help you identify opportunities to improve your strategy.

After all, these sites are packed with data that you can use to accurately measure social performance time and time again.

Understanding social media competitor analysis

Before we get into the three steps of competitive analysis, it's worthwhile to define exactly what it is we're talking about here.

Social media competitor analysis allows a company to closely examine its competitors' social media strategies, tactics, and presence on various platforms. In effect, it's a full audit of what “the other guys” are doing.

Through in-depth research and evaluation, you can gain valuable insights into the competitive landscape of your industry.

If you don't, you run the risk of encountering the same problems your competitors face when developing content strategies. You may also be missing out on simple ways to engage your audience.

Key components of social media competitor analysis

When we talk about competitive analysis on social media, there are really four core things that we're going to focus on.

These are:

  1. Your competitors
  2. Their social media strategies
  3. Their social media metrics
  4. Competitor analysis tools

By keeping these four things in mind, you can research relevant competitors, mine their social data, and apply your learnings to your strategy.

Of course, this is just the basics of social media competitor analysis. You can always go deeper, such as looking at businesses in other industries to see what they are doing on social.

For the purposes of this guide, we've split the social media competitive analysis process into three steps. After this, we've highlighted some competitive analysis tools that can help you harness the power of all this data.

In this guide, we cover:

Step 1: Identifying your competitors

As a business owner, marketer, or PR professional, you probably already know who your competitors are. You don't have to be a genius to know that the store down the street is more popular than yours, or that the agency in another state gets more clients than yours.

But it's not always easy to tell who your competitors are on social media. For example, if you're planning a controversial viral campaign to get noticed, the company you're competing with for market share of your product may not be a competitor here.

Instead, it could be a sportswear giant or an influencer-led shopping website that delivers the social media marketing strategy you want.

Direct vs. indirect competitors

Therefore, you need to consider the difference between direct and indirect competitors and who is more relevant to your social media plan.

  • Direct competitors are companies that offer the same products or services as yours in the same target market. For example, if your company sells athletic shoes, your direct competitors are other brands of athletic shoes.
  • Indirect competitors are companies that offer different products or services, but are competing for the same audience or trying to achieve the same impact. In the athletic shoe example, your indirect competitors could be companies that sell activewear or fitness accessories, or companies that run campaigns similar to the one you plan to create.

It's important to look at both direct and indirect competitors. This will help you understand what your industry is doing well and poorly on social, and where other brands outside your industry are succeeding or making mistakes.

You can use a tool to discover your direct and indirect social media competitors. We'll discuss which tools are best for this task at the end of this article.

For now, let's look at how to analyze a competitor once you've identified them.

Step 2: Analyzing your competitors

Social media competitor analysis doesn't have to be complicated. Once you have your list of direct and indirect competitors, you can plug them into your software and start analyzing their data.

There are several factors to consider when looking at a social media competitor, the most critical of which is their platforms. By identifying which platforms your competitors are using most, you can begin to build a picture of what you'll need for your strategy.

For example, suppose the athletic shoe company researched its competitors and found that most of its activity is on Facebook and YouTube, and that viral videos are the biggest drivers of direct sales. Perhaps our athletic footwear company should consider investing more in its own video production for Facebook and YouTube.

Other factors your tool can help you identify include:

  1. Content strategy: Evaluate and analyze when your competitors are posting (e.g., images, videos, GIFs, or text) and how regularly. Do they have a unique tone of voice? How long do their campaigns last? See what they do differently and what trends you can see across all of your competitors.
  2. Engagement: Evaluate how actively your competitors engage with their audiences. Look at the number of likes, comments, and shares their content is getting and try to understand what is driving that engagement. Is it viral videos, controversial statements, newsworthy communications, or maybe all three!
  3. Customer interaction: Look at how your competitors communicate with their audience. Do they respond promptly to comments or concerns? This can inform your approach to customer interaction.

Understanding your competitors' social presence provides valuable information that can guide your social media strategy. By identifying their strengths and weaknesses, you can refine your approach to attracting and engaging your target audience.

Dig deeper into your analysis

The growth of social media competitor analysis tools means you can dig deep into the data to find results for virtually any social account. However, if you're just starting out and want to get a general idea of your competitors' successes and failures, it's worth looking at engagement and growth metrics first.

Engagement rate and growth metrics

Understanding competitor performance can be found through metrics such as:

  • Follower growth
  • Likes
  • Shares
  • Comments

Together, these metrics show you how successful a competitor's campaign is.

Let's say a direct competitor to our athletic shoe brand launches a cool new marketing campaign across three social media platforms. You notice that the posts are getting a lot of likes and shares, but very few comments. What's more, the brand's follower count barely grows over the course of the campaign.

Obviously, the campaign was successful in getting the audience's attention to engage with a like or share, but that hasn't translated into broader success. Stagnant growth is an issue they need to address, but it's one you know about now and can plan to avoid.

In fact, growth is generally considered a sign of successful social media performance. But if you want to dig deeper into things like website clicks and ROI data, you'll need a more powerful tool.

Step 3: Applying insights to your social strategy

So you've analyzed your competitors' social media performance and have data on their most successful and least successful posts. You know what constitutes top-performing content and how much audience engagement your competitors have achieved.

Now it's time to use that data to inform your own content strategy.

Improve your content and engagement

Start by reviewing your existing content and planned social posts.

By examining your content topics and formats, as well as your engagement rates, you can identify areas where you can improve or get ahead of the competition.

Now you have data on your own social platforms and those of your competitors. You can make practical changes, such as:

  • Focusing on topics that resonate with your audience and are currently underrepresented
  • Adapting your brand persona to better connect with your audience and create a unique presence
  • Adjusting your content formats (e.g., images, videos, polls) to match audience preferences
  • Optimizing posting times and frequencies based on your audience's activity patterns

These insights from your competitive analysis can help you improve audience engagement and create a smarter strategy.

Innovate to stay ahead

Of course, conducting a round of competitive analysis on social media and making relevant changes to your content is a good place to start. But the value of these activities quickly fades if you don't keep the momentum going.

Competitive analysis needs to be a regular part of your strategy. We're talking about daily and weekly audits of your direct and indirect competitors so you can fully understand what's going on.

In the next section, we'll look at some tools that can help you do this.

Meanwhile, it's also important to stay ahead of the curve and track the innovations that are coming. The competitive media analytics landscape is constantly changing as technology makes it easier to dig deeper into audience interests and interactions.

To stay ahead, follow these steps:

  1. Experiment with new features: Platforms frequently introduce new features; be among the first to take advantage of those that align with your brand's goals.
  2. Stay on top of trends: Follow industry influencers and news outlets to stay on top of emerging trends that you can incorporate into your content.
  3. Analyze audience feedback: Actively engage with your audience and seek their opinions to better understand how to improve your content and online presence.

Best social media competitor analysis tools

Now it's time to take a look at the social media competitive analysis tools that can make the job much easier and ensure you're creating a long-term strategy.

These tools primarily use social listening to uncover data about audiences around the world — even those who don't interact directly with brands. We'll also show you a handful of free tools you can use to build your social media strategy if your budget doesn't allow for a more powerful, paid option.

Three social listening tools worth trying

Social listening tools help you monitor and analyze your competitors' activity on social media platforms. Without them, you won't be able to conduct effective competitive analysis on social media.

These tools allow you to uncover conversations and engagement trends that can give you key insights into their strategies. Here are three of the best:

Brandwatch

Brandwatch allows you to track keywords and brand mentions across multiple social media platforms with perhaps the most in-depth social listening software on the planet. We're talking billions of data points at your fingertips. Find your top competitors, get social media analysis on direct and indirect audiences, and predict the direction of online conversations before they happen.

>> Learn more about the Brandwatch Suite today!

Hootsuite

A strong option for those who need a comprehensive dashboard to evaluate competitor performance across a large social media landscape. Hootsuite can connect the dots between audiences on Facebook, X, Instagram, and more to see which competitors' strategies are working.

Mention

Like Brandwatch, Mention provides real-time monitoring of brand mentions and keywords across multiple social media channels. Use these key social media metrics to build a visual picture of your industry and identify strengths and weaknesses in your competitors' social media strategies.

Free analytics platforms

A social listening tool like Brandwatch helps you understand how audiences view and interact with brands. They also provide real-time insights into the basic data points you need to form the building blocks of your social media strategy.

But if you're searching for a free option to get you started, you can probably skip social listening for now. Instead, the integrated tools below will give you the initial data you need to start your journey.

  • Meta Audience Insights: This provides valuable demographic information about your competitors' Facebook and Instagram followers, helping you better understand their target audience.
  • Google Analytics: While primarily focused on website traffic, Google Analytics can also be used to analyze social media engagement. For example, you can monitor traffic from social channels and identify the most effective content for your target audience.
  • X Analytics: Premium subscribers to X can get more detailed analytics on their social media activity, and others. This primarily looks at metrics like total impressions, profile visits, engagement rate, video performance, and link clicks. It's basic, but it'll do the job if your company is willing to subscribe to the platform.

Free platforms are great for getting started and can be very useful when creating a social media strategy from scratch. However, they are not powerful enough on their own to perform a full social media competitor analysis if you really want to compete with companies and brands your size or larger.

To achieve this, you need a tool like Brandwatch that can house deep data in one place and help you develop strategies that are future-proof across multiple stages of growth.

Social media competitor analysis: What next?

So there you have it: a three-step guide to assessing your competitors' social media performance. The trick now is to implement these steps and start improving your own social media strategy.

Start by researching your direct and indirect competitors before digging into the data to gain deeper insights into how they operate. Use a tool to identify opportunities to expand your social presence while keeping a close eye on competitor content.

As a result, you should have a bulletproof strategy that identifies the engagement metrics and houses the relevant competitor data you need to succeed.

Now is the time to get out there and start your social media analysis journey! If you need more help, expand your competitive analysis knowledge with our Brandwatch Academy courses.