How to Do a Competitive Analysis on Social Media

Doing a competitive analysis on social media is less about spying and more about getting a clear picture of what's working in your niche so you can build a smarter strategy. It shows you what your audience is responding to, where your competitors are dropping the ball, and where you have a wide-open opportunity to stand out. This guide will walk you through a simple, step-by-step process to analyze your competition and find actionable insights that will improve your own social media presence.

First, Why Should You Even Bother?

Skipping this step is like navigating a new city without a map. A solid competitive analysis gives you a massive advantage by helping you:

• Spot Content Gaps: Find the topics, formats, or platforms your competitors are ignoring. Their blind spot is your opening.
• Understand Your Audience Better: See what kind of content makes your shared target audience take action - what they love, hate, or ask questions about.
• Avoid Their Mistakes: Why make your own mistakes when you can learn from theirs? If a certain type of content consistently flops for them, you know what to steer clear of.
• Benchmark Your Performance: Get a realistic sense of what's possible in your industry. It helps you set achievable goals for growth and engagement.
• Find Inspiration (Not Copy): Analyzing competitors gives you a ton of ideas for your own content pillars, brand voice, and engagement tactics. The idea is to learn from and improve upon, not imitate.

Step 1: Identify Your Competitors on Social Media

Before you get started, you need to know who you’re actually looking at. Your competition often falls into two main categories:

• Direct Competitors: These are the businesses or creators who offer a product or service similar to yours. If you sell artisan coffee beans online, other online artisan coffee bean sellers are your direct competitors.
• Indirect Competitors: These are brands that don't sell the exact same thing but are competing for the same audience’s attention, time, and money. For the coffee seller, this could be a local high-end cafe, a popular coffee recipe blogger, or even a brand that sells specialty tea.

Don't just think about who sells what you sell. Think about who your target customer follows. A great way to find them is to simply search on the social platforms themselves. Look up keywords related to your industry and see who shows up consistently. You can also do a quick Google search like "your industry + your city" or "best X accounts on Instagram."

To avoid getting overwhelmed, pick three to five of your most relevant competitors to start. You can always expand the list later. Focus on the ones you see mentioned everywhere, the ones who seem to have a really engaged community, or the ones you personally admire.

Step 2: Collect the Critical Data (The Manual Method)

Now it's time to roll up your sleeves and gather some information. Open up a simple spreadsheet (Google Sheets or Excel works perfectly) and create a tab for each competitor. For each one, you'll want to log details for every platform they're active on.

Your goal is to get a snapshot of their entire social media operation. Here's what to look for:

Profile Information

This is the first impression they make. Look at their main profile page on each platform.

• Platforms They Use: Where are they active? Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, YouTube? Are they anywhere you aren't?
• Follower Count: How large is their audience? Track this over time to gauge growth.
• Bio &, Link: What does their bio say? Is it clear? What call to action are they using? Where is their link in bio pointing - a homepage, a Linktree, a specific product page?

Content Strategy

This is the heart of the analysis. You need to understand what they post, when they post, and why they're posting it.

• Posting Frequency: How often do they post? Once a day? Three times a week? Are they posting Stories daily? This gives you a baseline for activity in your niche.
• Content Formats: What kind of media are they using most often? Scroll through their feed and make a note of the mix. Is it mostly short-form video (Reels, TikToks), image carousels, static graphics, user-generated content, or something else? Different formats produce different results.
• Content Pillars (or Themes): Look past the individual posts and identify the recurring themes. Most successful brands anchor their content in a few key "pillars." These might be things like: Educational (how-to guides, tutorials), Entertaining (memes, funny skits), Inspirational (quotes, success stories), or Promotional (product highlights, sales).
• Brand Voice &, Tone: How do they communicate? Are they formal and professional, casual and witty, or warm and supportive? The language they use in captions has a huge impact on their brand identity.

Engagement Metrics

A huge following isn't useful if no one is paying attention. Engagement metrics tell you how much their audience actually cares.

For a reliable snapshot, analyze their last 10–15 posts.

• Rate of Engagement: Instead of just looking at the total number of likes and comments, calculate the engagement rate. It levels the playing field between accounts with different follower counts. Here’s a simple formula: (Total Likes + Comments on a Post) / Total Followers * 100 = Engagement Rate %. Calculate this for a few of their top-performing and average-performing posts to get a feel for what works.
• Qualitative Comments: Don't just count the comments - read them. Are they genuine questions and compliments, or just single-word responses and emojis? Real conversation is a sign of a strong community. What questions are people asking? The answers could be content ideas for you!
• Community Management: Do they reply to comments? How quickly? Their approach to community management (or lack thereof) is a big part of their strategy.

Step 3: Analyze Your Notes for Strengths, Weaknesses, and Opportunities

Now you have a spreadsheet full of raw data. The next step is to make sense of it all. This is where you connect the dots and find out what it all means for your brand. A simple way to structure your analysis is to use a SWOT framework, focusing on your competitor’s:

• Strengths: Where are they absolutely crushing it? Maybe their Reels are consistently viral, or they have an incredibly powerful brand voice that people love. Note down what they do better than anyone else.
• Weaknesses: Where are they dropping the ball? Perhaps they post inconsistently, their visuals are messy, or they completely ignore their comments. These are areas you can't afford to ignore yourself.
• Opportunities: This is the most valuable part of the exercise. A competitor’s weakness is your opportunity. For example:
  • Is no one in your space using TikTok? That’s an open field for you.
  • Is their content all boring and promotional? You can win by being more educational or entertaining.
  • Do they take forever to respond to DMs? You can stand out with excellent customer service.
• Threats: What are they doing that presents a direct challenge? Maybe they have a huge content budget, a beloved founder who is the face of the brand, or they own a key hashtag in your niche. It’s important to be realistic about what you're up against.

By the end of this step, you should have a list of clear takeaways for each competitor.

Step 4: Turn Your Insights into an Action Plan

An analysis is only useful if it helps you make better decisions. The final step is to translate your findings into a concrete action plan for your own social media strategy. Don’t try to change everything at once. Pick two or three key changes based on the opportunities you uncovered.

For example, your plan might look something like this:

• Insight: "My main competitor gets 3x more engagement on educational carousels than on any other post type."
  Action: "I will test one educational carousel per week for the next month to see how my audience responds."
• Insight: "None of my direct competitors are consistently using Instagram Stories to show behind-the-scenes content."
  Action: "I will start posting three behind-the-scenes Stories every Tuesday and Thursday to build a more personal connection with my audience."
• Insight: "Every top performer in my niche is on TikTok, but their content is mostly repurposed from Instagram. There’s a chance to create native-feeling content."
  Action: "I will brainstorm and produce two TikTok-first video concepts this month and measure their performance."

Remember, a competitive analysis isn't a one-and-done task. The social media landscape changes fast, so plan on revisiting this process every three to six months to stay sharp and spot new opportunities as they emerge.

Final Thoughts

By identifying your competitors, gathering the right data, analyzing it for opportunities, and turning those insights into an action plan, you'll be able to create a social media strategy built on data, not just guesswork. It's a clear, repeatable process that will give you the confidence to know what content to create and how to position your brand to stand out from the noise.

When you're ready to put your new strategy into action, having the right tool to keep everything organized is a game-changer. We built Postbase because we found legacy tools were clunky and missing key features for modern social media, like reliable short-form video scheduling. Our visual content calendar makes it easy to plan and execute the new content mix you've decided on, while our unified inbox helps you stay on top of the community engagement you’re working so hard to build.

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