How to Track Competitors on Social Media

Your competitors are running a public focus group every single day - and broadcasting the results for free. Keeping an eye on what they post, what resonates with their audience, and where they fall short isn't about imitation, it's about gathering critical market intelligence. This guide will walk you through a simple, effective framework for tracking your competitors on social media, analyzing their strategy, and using those insights to make your own content more effective.

First, Identify Your Real Competitors

Before you start tracking, you need to know who you’re looking at. Most businesses have three types of competitors on social media, and monitoring a mix of them will give you the most comprehensive picture of your market.

• Direct Competitors: These are the obvious ones. They sell a similar product or service to the same target audience as you. If you’re a local coffee shop, the other coffee shop down the street is a direct competitor.
• Indirect Competitors: These businesses solve the same problem for your customer but with a different solution. For that coffee shop, an indirect competitor might be a juice bar, a boba tea shop, or even a local co-working space that offers free high-quality coffee. They are competing for the same "third place" customer.
• Aspirational Competitors: These are the brands you admire. They might be national leaders in your industry or even businesses in totally different fields that excel at social media. You may not compete with them for customers, but you compete with them for inspiration and ideas on excellent branding and community engagement.

Action Step: Start by making a simple list. Identify 3-5 competitors from each category. This will be your starting roster for analysis.

What to Track: Go Beyond Follower Counts

Amateur analysis stops at follower counts. Professional analysis looks at the engine behind the numbers. A massive following means nothing without engagement, and shiny posts don't matter if they don't align with a clear strategy. Focus on tracking these key areas.

1. High-Level Performance Metrics

These are the vital signs of their social media health. You don’t need to record them daily, but checking in monthly gives you a great sense of their momentum.

• Posting Frequency: How often are they posting on each platform? Are they active on Instagram Reels three times a week but ignore their LinkedIn page? This shows where they are focusing their energy.
• Engagement Rate: This is a more meaningful metric than just counting likes. To get a rough idea, take an average of the likes and comments on their last 10 posts and divide it by their total follower count. A competitor with 100,000 followers and 50 likes per post is doing worse than one with 10,000 followers and 500 likes per post.
• Follower Growth: Is their follower count growing, stagnating, or shrinking over time? Steady growth often indicates their content is hitting the mark.

2. Content and Strategy Analysis

This is where the richest insights are found. Look at the what and the why behind their posts.

Content Formats

What types of media do they primarily use? The format often dictates the strategy.

• Are they all-in on short-form video like Reels and TikToks?
• Do they prefer polished, well-designed Instagram carousels?
• Are they leveraging user-generated content (UGC) by reposting customer photos?
• Do they rely on simple, text-based posts on platforms like X or Threads?
• How actively do they use ephemeral content like Instagram Stories? Are they running polls, Q&As, or behind-the-scenes clips?

Analyzing their format distribution shows you what they believe is the most effective way to reach their audience - and reveals potential gaps. If all your competitors focus on long-form video, perhaps there's an opportunity for quick, helpful carousels.

Content Themes & Pillars

Step back and look at the last month of their posts. What are the recurring topics or themes? Most successful brands build their content around a few core "pillars."

• Educational: How-to guides, tutorials, myth-busting, industry insights.
• Entertaining: Memes, relatable humor, skits, trending audio clips.
• Inspirational: Success stories, motivational quotes, customer spotlights.
• Community-Building: Asking questions, running polls, hosting giveaways, featuring user content.
• Promotional: Product announcements, sale information, testimonials.

Identifying their content pillars gives you a blueprint of their overall social media strategy.

Top and Bottom Performing Posts

Every account has breakout hits and complete flops. Both are incredibly valuable for you to analyze.

• The Hits: Scroll through their feed and find the 3-5 posts with the highest engagement. What do they have in common? Was it a relatable meme? A particularly well-filmed tutorial? A post that tapped into a viral trend? This is a direct signal of what their audience loves.
• The Misses: Likewise, find the posts that fell flat. Did people ignore their corporate announcement? Did a low-effort graphic get zero traction? These failures are free lessons for you on what not to spend time on.

3. Audience Engagement & Community Management

How a brand interacts with its audience shows how strong its community really is.

• Comment Sentiment: What is the general feeling in their comments section? Are people excited, thankful, and complimentary? Or are the comments filled with customer service complaints and criticism?
• Reply Strategy: Do they reply to comments? How quickly? Is their tone helpful and personal, or do they use generic, canned responses? A brand that actively engages in its own comment section is building a much more loyal following.

The "How-To": Your Competitor Tracking Toolkit

You don't need expensive enterprise software to do this effectively. You can get started with some basic organization and freely available tools.

The Manual Method: The Competitor Audit Spreadsheet

The best way to start is with a simple spreadsheet. It’s free, customizable, and forces you to actively look at the data. Set aside an hour once or twice a month to fill it out.

Create a Google Sheet or Excel file with a separate tab for each competitor. On each tab, set up columns like these:


| Date | Platform | Follower Count | Posts This Week | Avg. Engagement | Top Post (Link) | Content Notes |
|------------|------------|----------------|-----------------|-----------------|----------------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------|
| 2024-10-01 | Instagram | 15,320 | 4 | 3.1% | https://instagram.com/p/Cxyz... | Heavy on video this week. 1 product-focused Reel. |
| 2024-10-01 | TikTok | 8,750 | 6 | 5.8% | https://tiktok.com/@competitor/video/1234... | Two posts using trending audio performed very well. |



This process transforms passive observation into an active audit. After a few months, you’ll have a clear, data-backed view of their strategy, rhythm, and seasonal shifts.

Using Native Platform Features

Social media platforms themselves have built-in transparency tools you can use for free.

• Facebook Ad Library: Wondering what ads your competitor is running? Just go to the Facebook Ad Library, search for their page, and you’ll see every active ad they have on Facebook and Instagram. This is an incredible source of competitor intelligence.
• Instagram's "About This Account": On any business/creator profile, tap the three dots in the top-right corner and select "About This Account." You can see the date they joined, their location, and any past usernames. More importantly, you can also see any active ads they are running.
• TikTok Search: Search for your competitor’s branded hashtags or look at the sounds they are using. This can help you spot trends or user-generated content campaigns you might have otherwise missed.

Turning Your Research into Actionable Strategy

Data is useless if you don't act on it. The final step is to synthesize your findings and apply them to your own content strategy. Remember, the goal isn't to become a cheap knockoff of your competitor, it's to find a better, smarter, more unique way to serve your audience.

After your audit, ask yourself these questions:

1. What are they doing well that we can learn from? If their how-to video tutorials get huge engagement, it’s a strong sign your audience appreciates educational content. How can you create your own educational content with your unique voice and expertise?
2. Where are they dropping the ball? If their comment section is filled with questions that go unanswered for days, you have a clear opportunity to stand out with exceptional community management. If their content is all stale stock photos, you can win by showing authentic, behind-the-scenes footage.
3. What aren't they doing at all? Find the white space. If every competitor is super serious and corporate, maybe there's a huge opportunity for a brand with a witty and relatable voice. If everyone is on Instagram, but no one has a presence on TikTok, you might have a first-mover advantage.

This analysis will give you a list of validated ideas to test. Maybe you experiment with a new content pillar, try out a different format for a week, or adjust your posting frequency. Let your competitor’s data provide the hypothesis, then let your own performance data provide the answer.

Final Thoughts

Consistently tracking your competitors transforms social media from a reactive guessing game into a strategic operation. By understanding what resonates with your shared audience, identifying market gaps, and learning from others’ successes and failures, you can build a more resilient and effective content strategy that truly connects with people.

After gathering all of this data, the real work of planning, creating, scheduling, and measuring your own content begins. We know that juggling a dynamic content calendar while analyzing what's working can be a huge lift. We built Postbase to streamline this entire process. Our visual calendar helps you lay out your strategy at a glance, and our analytics dashboard brings all your performance data from every platform into one clean view, making it far easier to compare your efforts to the benchmarks you’ve just established.