How to Analyze Competitors' Social Media

Knowing what your competitors are doing on social media is the difference between flying blind and having a map. It replaces guesswork with strategy and transforms your content process from reactive to proactive. This guide provides a straightforward framework for analyzing their social media, helping you find opportunities to improve your own approach and stand out in a crowded space.

Why Spend Time Analyzing Competitors in the First Place?

Let's be clear: the goal of competitive analysis isn't to copy what everyone else is doing. It’s about gathering intelligence to make smarter, more informed decisions for your own brand. Think of it as a strategic shortcut to understanding your industry's social media landscape.

By watching your competitors, you can:

• Find Content Inspiration: See which topics, formats, and angles are already resonating with your shared target audience. This helps you skip the trial-and-error phase and start creating content that has a higher chance of hitting the mark.
• Identify Gaps in the Market: Notice what your competitors are not doing. Maybe nobody is making funny, relatable TikToks, or perhaps educational LinkedIn carousels are an untapped opportunity. These gaps are your openings to own a niche.
• Benchmark Your Performance: Get a reality check on your own efforts. Are your follower growth and engagement rates on par with the industry standard? Understanding the baseline helps you set realistic goals for your own accounts.
• Learn from Their Mistakes: See which campaigns or posts fell flat for them. Analyzing a competitor's misstep is a totally free lesson in what not to do, saving you time, budget, and potential embarrassment.

In short, it’s about learning what works, what doesn’t, and where you can carve out a unique space for your brand voice to shine.

Step 1: Identify Who You’re Actually Competing With

Your first task is to define your list of competitors. Most people stop at the obvious, but to get a full picture, you should think in three categories.

Direct Competitors

These are the brands that immediately come to mind. They sell a similar product or service to the exact same target audience as you. If a customer is considering buying from you, they are almost certainly considering buying from them as well.

Example: If you sell artisan coffee beans online, other online artisan coffee bean sellers are your direct competitors.

Indirect Competitors

These businesses solve the same problem for your audience but with a different solution. They are competing for the same "share of wallet" or "share of attention," even if their product isn't identical.

Example: For the artisan coffee seller, an indirect competitor could be a local high-end coffee shop or even a subscription service for premium tea. They all solve the need for a quality morning beverage.

Aspirational Brands

These are brands that you admire, even if they're in a completely different industry. They may not be competitors at all, but they are absolutely killing it on social media with the audience you want to reach. Analyzing them can give you creative ideas for content formats, brand voice, and community building that you can adapt to your own niche.

Example: A small B2B software company might look to a brand like Slack or Notion for inspiration on building a community-focused, engaging social presence.

Aim for a list of 3-5 competitors across these categories. That’s enough to get meaningful insights without getting bogged down in too much data.

Step 2: Define What You’re Going to Track

You can’t analyze everything, so focus on the metrics and tactics that matter most. Avoid vanity metrics (like raw follower counts in isolation) and focus on data that reveals strategic choices. Create a simple spreadsheet to track your findings. Here’s what you should include columns for:

• Platform Presence: Which channels are they active on? (Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, etc.) Note where they seem to put the most effort.
• Follower Growth: Record their follower count at the start and end of your analysis period (e.g., monthly) to see their growth trajectory.
• Posting Frequency: How often are they posting on each platform? Calculate a weekly average. Consistency is a strategy in itself.
• Engagement Rate: This is a crucial metric. For a given post, you can calculate it roughly as: (Likes + Comments) / Follower Count * 100. Tracking this gives you a much better sense of audience connection than just raw likes on their largest account.
• Content Formats: Tally up the types of content they post over a week or two. Are they heavy on Reels, carousels, static images, Stories, or text updates?
• Content Pillars: What are their main themes? Identify 3-4 recurring topics they talk about (e.g., behind-the-scenes, product demos, user-generated content, industry news, memes).
• Brand Voice/Tone: Is their personality funny, professional, inspirational, quirky, or educational?

Step 3: Analyze Their Content Strategy - The Deep Dive

Now that your spreadsheet is set up, it's time to dig into what they're actually posting. This is where the most valuable insights live. Spend some time on their profiles and ask yourself these questions.

What Are Their Top-Performing Posts?

Scroll through their feeds for the past month and look for the outliers - the posts that got significantly more likes, comments, and shares than their average. For each high-performer, diagnose why it worked.

• Did it tap into a current trend or meme?
• Was it an exceptionally helpful tutorial or tip?
• Did it feature a giveaway or user-generated content?
• Was it a powerful story or an emotional, behind-the-scenes look?

Don't just note what the post was, analyze a popular post angle or topic. This isn't about copying their post idea but understanding the type of value your shared audience gets excited about.

What’s their Content Mix?

Look at the breakdown you tracked in your spreadsheet. If a competitor is posting 80% video (Reels/TikToks) and their engagement is soaring, that’s a strong signal that a video-first approach is performing well to your audience. Conversely, if another competitor posts only promotional graphics and their engagement is dead, that's an equally valuable insight. Their content mix tells you where they're placing their bets and whether those bets are paying off.

How Is Their Brand Voice and Visual Identity?

Read their captions. Look at their visuals. Is everything seamless and professional, or is it more human and a little unpolished? A strong brand personality stands out. Do they use emojis? Slang? Are their captions short and punchy or long and story-driven? Consistency in voice and visuals builds brand recognition, and you can see how well your competitors are pulling it off.

What’s Their Hashtag Strategy?

Are they using broad, high-volume hashtags or hyper-niche, community-specific ones? Do they put them in the caption or in the first comment? Some brands use only 3-5 hashtags, while others use all 30 that Instagram allows. See what feels most common among the successful players in your space. Often, a mix of popular and niche hashtags is a winning combo.

Step 4: Putting It All Together with a Simple SWOT Analysis

Once your research is done, the data needs to be turned into action. A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is a perfect, easy framework to organize your findings from your perspective. This turns data into a strategy.

Based on your competitor research...

• Strengths: Where is your social media presence already winning?
  "Our 'meet the team' content performs way better than any of our competitors' culture posts. We have a stronger human element."
• Weaknesses: Where are you falling behind your competitors?
  "Competitor A responds to every DM and comment within an hour. We sometimes take a full day. Their community feels more supported."
• Opportunities: What gaps did you find that your brand can fill?
  "None of our competitors have a dedicated YouTube Shorts strategy. We could own that space by creating bite-sized video tutorials."
• Threats: What are your competitors doing that could hurt your growth or market share?
  "Competitor B just launched a partnership with a huge influencer in our niche. We need a plan to activate our own micro-influencers to stay relevant."

This simple exercise moves you from observation to a game plan. Your competitive analysis should inspire you to lean into your strengths, fix your weaknesses, jump on opportunities, and build defenses against threats.

Final Thoughts

Running a competitive analysis isn’t a one-time thing. Set a reminder to do a refresh every quarter to stay on top of new trends, platform shifts, and changes in your competitors’ strategies. This process helps you create smarter, more effective social media campaigns that are built on data, not just feelings.

Knowing what your competitors are doing is one part of the equation, knowing what works for you is the other. We built Postbase to make that second part incredibly simple. When it comes time to execute your new, data-driven strategy, our platform provides a clear, no-fuss analytics dashboard so you can track your performance across every platform in one place. You’ll be able to see immediately if your new content ideas are hitting the mark and double down on what’s working, without getting lost in multiple complicated reports.