Social media competitor analysis is a key step in developing your own strategy and learning from the mistakes and successes of others.
Whether you're a startup focusing on a niche market or an established corporation, social media competitor analysis will give you a powerful overview of your market and your audience's needs. It's your compass to building and maintaining a relevant digital strategy in 2025 and beyond.
Social media competitor analysis is a key step in developing your own strategy. 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 create a brilliant marketing campaign that doesn't make an impact because it's too similar to what others in your industry are already 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're serious about developing a successful online strategy, you need to conduct a deep, systematic 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.
What is social media competitor analysis?
Before we get into the three steps of competitive analysis, it's worthwhile to define exactly what we're talking about here.
Social media competitor analysis is a systematic process of monitoring and analyzing information about your competitors' content, customer service, and campaigns on social media. It 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. This will help you get insights into what works in your industry, areas you need to rethink, and ideas on how to upgrade your marketing plan.
If you don't do this, 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 and discover new market trends before they go mainstream.
Why social media competitive analysis matters
Keeping an eye on your brand's performance is crucial, but so is monitoring and analyzing your competitors. A social media competitive analysis will enable your brand to:
- Identify and keep an eye on your competitors
- Understand which social networks they use
- Discover their audience profile and behavior
- Find out what is the best time to post for your industry
- Get inspired by their content
- Find gaps in your social media strategy and adapt it accordingly
- See where you rank in your industry
- Discover new market trends before they become mainstream
- Understand what resonates with your shared audience
- Identify opportunities to differentiate your brand
The list goes on. By understanding your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, you can refine your approach to attracting and engaging your target audience.
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, social media sites are packed with data that you can use to accurately measure social performance time and time again.
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:
1. Your competitors: Understanding who you're actually competing against on social media (which may differ from your business competitors)
2. Their social media strategies: What platforms they use, how they engage, and what content they create
3. Their social media metrics: Follower growth, engagement rates, reach, and other quantifiable performance indicators
4. Competitor analysis tools: Software and platforms that help you gather and analyze this data efficiently
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're doing on social that could inspire your own approach.
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.
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 to emulate.
The first step is to get to know your competition. Keep in mind that there are a couple of categories you should consider.
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. Start by analyzing your direct competitors — you most probably share the same audience and offer similar products or services. 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. Don't forget to also investigate the indirect competition, which can be high-end or low-end substitutes in your industry. Such new insights can put the puzzle together about your audience.
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.
How to find your social media competitors
A good way to start your competitor analysis is by a keyword search on Google. Check who is ranking against the 10 most relevant industry or product keywords that are relevant for your brand. This will give you an idea of who your top competition is.
Also, pay attention to the brands who invest in Google ads in order to get their names on top of organic search. Pick the 5 most relevant brands and research them further on social media. It's completely possible that search engines' results differ from the social networks' ones, so keep your eyes open for brands with similar target audiences and successful results.
You can use a tool like Brandwatch to discover your direct and indirect social media competitors through social listening. Social listening can reveal which brands are mentioned alongside yours, who shares your target audience, and which companies are winning conversations in your category. 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.
Now that you've found your competitor group, it's time to dig deeper into their strengths and weaknesses on social media.
Key questions to ask
You should address questions like:
- What social channels do they use?
- How large is their following and how fast does it grow?
- How often do they post?
- What kind of content do they offer?
- How does the audience engage with their posts?
- What kind of hashtags do they use?
- How fast do they respond to comments and engage with the community?
- What makes them unique?
- What tone of voice do they use?
- How long do their campaigns last?
The metrics you want to follow also depend on the goals and development stage of your business. If you are a new startup, you might want to focus on building your fanbase first. But if you are an established company, engagement could be a leading metric to follow.
Platform analysis
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 an athletic shoe company researched its competitors and found that most of its activity is on TikTok and Instagram, and that short-form video content showcasing product features drives the most direct sales. Perhaps our athletic footwear company should consider investing more in its own video production for these platforms.
Content strategy analysis
Evaluate and analyze the type of content your competitors are posting (e.g., images, videos, Reels, Stories, or text) and how regularly they post. 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.
You can also use tools for more in-depth analysis and easily follow your competitors' content marketing strategies more closely. For example, with Brandwatch Benchmark, you can monitor your competitors' posts, campaigns, hashtags, and user interactions. Monitor your competitors and learn from their ideas, successes, and failures just as you would your own.
Engagement analysis
Evaluate how actively your competitors engage with their audiences. Look at the number of likes, comments, shares, and saves their content is getting and try to understand what is driving that engagement. Is it viral videos, controversial statements, newsworthy communications, authentic storytelling, or maybe all three?
In 2025, we're seeing that authentic, unpolished content often outperforms heavily produced material, particularly on platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels. Pay attention to whether your competitors are embracing this trend or sticking to more traditional polished content.
Customer interaction
Look at how your competitors communicate with their audience. Do they respond promptly to comments or concerns? How do they handle negative feedback? This can inform your approach to customer interaction and community management.
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 and reactions
- Shares and saves
- Comments and replies
- Engagement rate (total engagements divided by reach or followers)
- Reach and impressions
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 new sustainability 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 your own campaigns.
In fact, follower growth is generally considered a sign of successful social media performance. But if you want to dig deeper into things like website clicks, conversions, and ROI data, you'll need a more powerful tool.
Audience analysis
Understanding who your competitors' audiences are can reveal opportunities for your brand. Using tools like Brandwatch Social Panels, you can analyze a competitor's following on X, including who they are, what they talk about, and who influences them.
You can also stretch your research to include Reddit, one of the most visited websites in the world, and find generational insights of those discussing your competitor using Reddit Social Panels.
Share of voice analysis
It's also important to see who has the biggest share of voice on social media. This metric tells you what percentage of the conversation in your category belongs to each brand.
Share of voice analysis helps you understand not just how much your competitors are posting, but how much of the overall conversation they're capturing. A brand could post less frequently but still dominate share of voice if their content generates significant earned media and user-generated content.
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 - Identify topics that your audience cares about but are currently underrepresented in your industry's social conversation
- Adapting your brand persona - Refine your voice and tone to better connect with your audience and create a unique presence that stands out from competitors
- Adjusting your content formats - Match audience preferences by shifting your mix of images, videos, carousels, Stories, Reels, or other formats based on what performs best
- Optimizing posting times and frequencies - Use data on your audience's activity patterns to schedule posts when they're most likely to engage
- Identifying content gaps - Find opportunities where competitors aren't serving audience needs and fill those gaps with valuable content
These insights from your competitive analysis can help you improve audience engagement and create a smarter, more differentiated strategy.
Benchmark your performance
You can also use the S.W.O.T. analysis framework to create a clear overview of where you stand against your competitors and understand your brand's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats better. This will help you adapt and upgrade your social media strategy.
It's important to identify your own brand's strengths and weaknesses as well as perform a social audit at least every six months. With tools like Benchmark, you can understand which parts of your social media strategy are contributing to your success as well as discover opportunities and potential weaknesses.
Benchmark content strategy
A very special aspect to consider is to benchmark your content strategy against the competition. Are your competitors offering original, curated, or promotional content on social media? Do they focus on inspirational or educational posts? What kind of formats do they use?
This can bring a data-driven change in your own content strategy and thus help you engage better with your community.
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 your industry and react quickly to changes.
Based on the information gathered and your smart analysis, it's now time to formulate your social media strategy. But the hard work with competitive analysis doesn't stop at this point. You need to carry on such research at least every six months in order to stay up to date with all trends.
In the next section, we'll look at some tools that can help you do this efficiently.
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:
- 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
- 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
- Analyze audience feedback - Actively engage with your audience and seek their opinions to better understand how to improve your content and online presence
- Test and iterate - Don't just copy what competitors do; test variations and find what works uniquely well for your brand and audience
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, sustainable strategy.
These tools primarily use social listening and social media analytics 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.
Social listening and benchmarking 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. Brandwatch Consumer Research gives you access to insights from over 100 million websites and more than 1.4 trillion posts, with historical data going back to 2010.
For social media benchmarking specifically, Brandwatch Benchmark allows you to instantly compare your social performance against a database of 100,000+ brands across all major social networks (Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok, and more).
The platform helps you:
- Translate your data smoothly into an actionable plan
- Take the guesswork out of your social strategies
- Understand what, when, and how often to post
- Get a clear picture of what's driving results from more than 100,000 brands across all major social media platforms
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.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social offers robust social listening and competitive analysis features, helping you track competitor performance, industry benchmarks, and audience sentiment across multiple platforms.
Manual monitoring options
There are two ways you can handle competitive analysis — manually or via sophisticated tools. If you choose to go the manual route, you should consider tracking the following weekly metrics:
- Follower count changes
- Post frequency
- Engagement rates (likes, comments, shares per post)
- Content themes and formats
- Campaign launches and durations
- Hashtag performance
- Response times to customer inquiries
However, manual tracking is time-consuming and makes it difficult to spot patterns or track historical trends. That's why most brands that are serious about competitive analysis invest in dedicated tools.
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 Business Suite - This provides valuable demographic information about your competitors' Facebook and Instagram activity, helping you better understand their target audience and content performance
- 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 competitors'. 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, provide historical context, and help you develop strategies that are future-proof across multiple stages of growth.
Turning analysis into action: Next steps
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.
Your action plan
- Research your direct and indirect competitors - Start with 5-10 brands and expand from there
- Dig into the data - Use tools to gain deeper insights into how they operate, what works, and what doesn't
- Identify opportunities - Look for gaps in the market, underserved audiences, or content themes that could differentiate your brand
- Apply your learnings - Make strategic changes to your content, posting schedule, engagement approach, and overall strategy
- Monitor continuously - Set up ongoing tracking so you can spot changes and trends in real-time
- Iterate and improve - Regularly review your performance against competitors and adjust your approach
As a result, you should have a bulletproof strategy that identifies the engagement metrics and houses the relevant competitor data you need to succeed.
Keeping up with industry changes
The social media landscape evolves rapidly. What worked last year might not work this year, and what works today might be obsolete in five years' time. That's why continuous competitive analysis is so important.
Stay alert to:
- New platforms gaining traction in your industry
- Shifts in content formats and features
- Changes in audience behavior and preferences
- Emerging competitors, especially digitally-native brands
- Algorithm changes that affect content distribution
- New features and tools released by social platforms
