How to Run a Brand Competitive Analysis on Social Media: A Step-by-Step Guide

Tracking a competitor's likes doesn’t equal understanding why they own a bigger piece of your market. And that’s what brand competitive analysis helps you uncover. 

When we run a brand competitive analysis, we switch focus from analyzing the brand performance to analyzing brand positioning. This analysis treats competitors’ social media content not as an engagement engine, but as a way their positioning manifests to your shared audience. 

In this article, I'll show you how to run a brand competitive analysis step by step, from competitive benchmarking to turning your findings into changes in your content strategy.

Key takeaways

• Tracking competitors focuses on monitoring their content and performance, while understanding your competitive brand position means analyzing how your brand compares in messaging, audience, share of voice, and market perception to uncover strategic opportunities.
• A comprehensive brand competitive analysis should evaluate five key layers: brand positioning and messaging, audience and community, content and channel strategy, share of voice and visibility, and brand sentiment and perception.
• Turn competitive analysis into strategy by categorizing insights into actions you should reinforce, differentiate, or counter, then prioritize the initiatives that best support your business goals and brand positioning.

What’s the difference between "tracking competitors" and actually understanding your competitive brand position?

There are two ways to approach the analysis of competitors' strategies: at the content and engagement level or at the brand positioning level. 

Neither one is better, but they do answer different questions.

Content-level competitive monitoring is your day-to-day tool. It looks at posting frequency, best-performing pieces, and engagement rate by format. You analyze competitors on social media to tweak your own content strategy. 

Competitive brand analysis is on a higher strategic level. When you’re analyzing brand positioning, you zoom out from individual posts or even content pillars into a bigger brand picture.  

A competitive brand analysis at this level asks:

• How brands talk about themselves on social media and what they claim to stand for
• Who their audience is, and how much it overlaps with yours
• Their share of voice online vs. yours — who owns the market and stays top of mind with your shared audience
• How people perceive the brand aside from what the brand says about itself

Brand competitive analysis forms not only your content strategy, but what your brand is and how you present it to the outer world.

What data layers should you go through when running a brand competitive analysis?

When you're working on a brand competitor analysis, you're still analyzing social media content among other things. But that's only one piece of the puzzle. 

Before I guide you through how to conduct a competitive analysis, let's quickly cover the layers you need to get the information you want. 

Brand positioning & messaging

This is where you identify what competitors' core value propositions are, and how they communicate them. 

A big part of competitors' positioning analysis is understanding what sets you apart on a foundational level. Look at how a brand frames its purpose, who it says it's for, and what story it tells about itself over and over.

Take car manufacturers as an example:

• Tesla: Founder-centric, close to zero traditional ad spend, relying almost entirely on online memes, controversy, and tech hype to stay in the conversation.
• Ford: Heritage-focused, sentimental, patriotic, built around hard work, reliability, and community trust.

Same industry, same goal (sell cars), completely different approach. This positioning is what will guide their hand across all the other layers and their strategies. 

Audience & community

The social media audience analysis and understanding the people you sell to is the foundation everything else sits on. However, don’t treat this layer as follower count competition. 

For example, Tesla's massive following is largely made up of fans, people who love the meme culture, the controversy, the Musk factor, but who may never buy a car. A quieter competitor — like Ford — might have fewer followers overall, but most of them will be looking for a purchase. 

This is why overlap matters more than size. Look at who's engaging with a competitor and ask whether that's the same crowd you're trying to reach. Sometimes that difference reveals a niche, a specific use case, or an audience segment nobody else is serving.

Content & channel strategy

The difference in positioning shows up both in what a brand sells and in how it behaves online so that it can reach out to the right audience.

Ford's Instagram is sleek, stylish, classic. Tesla is, well, Tesla: cyberpunk memes, Darth Vader references, robots blowing kisses. A content analysis will show you just that — the difference in positioning between the two. 

So how do you identify these differences in practice? Check these two things.

Which platforms are competitors investing in, and why does that matter for your brand?

With socialinsider, you can get performance data across various brands and channels to easily identify a brand's winning platform.

Tesla is, obviously, putting its energy into X. Ford leans into Instagram. The platform a competitor treats as its main hub tells you two things at once: 

• Their positioning — how they talk, what they choose to show, what they believe their biggest strength is. 
• Their audience — who spends time on X versus who spends time on Instagram, and which group is responding better. 

If a competitor is investing heavily in a platform you've written off, that's worth a second look. Either they know something about the audience there that you don't, or they're spread too thin and quietly underperforming.

Format bets: what content types are they doubling down on?

Formats matter just as much as platforms. In a competitor audit, the formats a brand leans on are tightly connected to three things:

• The offer. A highly visual product, like a car or a fashion line, tends to rely on video and carousels to show it off. A service-based offer might lean more toward text-driven posts or founder-led content.
• The audience. Younger, faster-scrolling audiences respond better to short-form video. More research-driven audiences engage more with long-form or carousel content that gives them something to sit with.
• The tone of voice. A playful, meme-heavy brand voice needs formats that support quick, punchy delivery. A heritage-focused, sentimental voice favors slower, story-driven formats like longer videos or photo essays.

Format choice gives you a read on how a brand wants to be seen, and engagement tells you whether that positioning is actually landing with people or not.

Share of Voice & visibility

Let’s start with the more familiar one: visibility. 

When you’re conducting a brand competitive analysis, visibility tells you, well, how visible the brand is on the market. Usually it is measured through follower growth and monthly reach or impressions that you can track in tools like Socialinsider alongside your own metrics.  

But besides sheer visibility numbers, there is a more complex social media metric that reflects who’s leading the conversation on the market. 

Share of voice is the percentage of total conversation in your market that belongs to your brand, measured against your competitors. Unlike reach or follower growth, which focuses on visibility alone, share of voice is based on mentions, engagement, or overall activity. 

My advice for this layer of competitors’ positioning analysis: look at visibility data, but back it up with share of voice for a more realistic view. 

Brand sentiment & perception

In an analysis of the competitors, positioning, audience, content, and share of voice all lead somewhere: the story people tell about a brand when nobody from that brand is in the room.

Tesla is a good example of a polarizing brand. People either love it or hate it, and both reactions show up loudly online. Ford sits at the other end. Its narrative is calmer, and nobody's staging a protest over a pickup truck ad.

The narrative around a brand feeds directly into trust, conversions, and long-term success, so understanding whether a competitor is loved or just tolerated tells you more than engagement numbers alone.

How to conduct a brand competitive analysis: step-by-step

A brand competitive analysis isn't something you do every week. Because brand positioning is a high-level strategic exercise, I recommend running a full-scale competitive brand analysis every quarter, using it to lay the foundation for your next steps in mid- to long-term planning.

Use this framework for how to analyze competitors from a brand positioning point of view:

Define your goals and the decisions this analysis needs to inform

A brand competitive analysis for a new product entering the market looks different from one for a brand that's already established and looking to improve. 

The goals you set will shape the approach you take, and the action points you walk away with. Align these goals with your broader business objectives for the quarter or half-year. 

Say your big objective is increasing brand visibility by reaching a new audience segment. Think about what that requires. Maybe it means launching on a new channel? If so, the main output of your competitor's strategy analysis should be identifying the right channel and shaping a strategy for it.

Build your competitor shortlist

Keep your competitor list short, but make sure it's well-rounded. Whenever I analyze competitors, I always include: 

• Direct competitors. Brands that do what you do: same industry, similar products, same target audience. 
• Indirect competitors. Brands that might not sell the same product, but still compete for your audience's attention and trust. 
• Aspirational brands. Brands you look up to, not because they're in your space, but because they're doing something you'd love to replicate. Think of a brand outside your category with a voice, community, or launch strategy you admire enough to study.
• Category disruptors. Newer or unconventional players shaking up the space you're in, or threatening to. These are the brands that are pulling attention away from established players, sometimes before anyone else notices.

Collect data across the 5 dimensions — what to track and where

Data collection is the core step of the whole process. It feels like more data should mean better conclusions, but that's not exactly the case. 

What you need is clean, reliable, and, most importantly, relevant data. I recommend automating data collection as much as possible with the right mix of tools, so you get everything you need without spending hours manually digging it up. 

Using social media analytics tools

Social media analytics tools help you gather information about competitors' content strategies, audiences, and how their brand positioning plays out in their posts. 

When you’re digging through the social media analytics layer, make sure to grab these data points for a solid content competitor analysis:

• Posting frequency. How often competitors show up tells you how much weight they're putting behind a platform, and how consistent their presence really is. A brand posting daily on X but once a month on LinkedIn is telling you where its priorities sit.

• Follower growth and reach. These are your markers of visibility and relevancy. Steady growth signals a brand is expanding its audience and staying in front of new people, while flat or declining numbers can point to a brand losing momentum or relevance.

• Engagement. Look at how engaged people are and which platforms drive the most interaction. High follower counts with low engagement usually mean a passive, uninvested audience, and strong engagement on a smaller account often signals a loyal, active community.

• Top content pillars. Analyzing content pillars is a central part of any content competitor analysis. It shows you what competitors talk about most, and what topics you might be missing entirely. If a competitor's top pillar is something you've never touched, that's a potential blind spot in your strategy. 

• Organic value. This is Socialinsider's proprietary metric that estimates how much ad spend it would take to achieve the same results a competitor is getting organically. It helps you prove social media’s value and translate competitors’ success into dollars. 

PS: You can use Socialinsider for analysis of competitors' strategies across social media, pulling all five of these data points cross-platform. Just sayin’.

Using social listening tools

Social listening tools help you track things outside of competitors’ well-kept social media accounts. They tap into the wider conversation happening around the brands online. 

For industry competitive analysis, here's what social listening tools help you track:

• Share of voice. This tells you what percentage of the total conversation in your market belongs to each competitor, so you can see who's leading the narrative.
• Sentiment. Volume alone doesn't tell you if the attention a competitor gets is positive, negative, or mixed. Tracking sentiment shows you whether people truly like or dislike the brand’s offer.
• Volume of mentions. This shows you how often a brand comes up in conversation, on its own channels and off them. A spike in mentions after a launch or a controversy can reveal how much real-world attention a competitor is pulling.

Social listening fills in the part of the picture competitors won't show you themselves: what people say when the brand isn't in the room.

Using surveys

Surveys take more time and, often, more budget than pulling data from a dashboard. But they answer some questions neither analytics nor listening tools can say for sure, like why someone prefers one brand over another.

A well-placed survey question can uncover the reasoning behind a switch, a purchase, or a lost customer. A few places to work this in:

• Onboarding flows. Ask new customers what tool or brand they switched from, and why. This gives you a direct line into what competitors are failing to deliver.
• Exit or cancellation surveys. When someone leaves, ask where they're going next. This tells you who you're losing customers to, which isn't always the competitor you'd expect.
• Post-purchase surveys. A quick question like "what almost stopped you from buying" can surface hesitations tied directly to how a competitor is positioned in the buyer's mind.

Surveys won't scale the way analytics tools do, but for analysis of the competitors that focuses on motivation more than numbers, they're often the most honest source you'll get.

Benchmark your brand against each competitor

Benchmarking is one of the core competitive analysis techniques, and probably the most reliable one. 

Benchmarking puts your numbers in context, which is often the hardest part of comparing social media performance of brands. When I run a brand competitive analysis and benchmark my brand against others, I split the benchmarks into two categories:

• Realistic benchmarks. These come from brands in the same niche and roughly the same size as mine. I use these benchmarks to see whether my current performance is good or average within my own niche. 
• Aspirational benchmarks. These come from slightly bigger brands, bigger in production, following, history, or anything else that matters to my goals. This is where I want my brand to be, so I use these benchmarks to set KPIs and long-term targets.

“Comparing performance” also means understanding what's driving the difference in numbers and how you can close the gap.

This is where AI for competitive analysis comes in handy, connecting the dots and finding patterns you might miss on your own. Socialinsider's AI assistant can help build more tailored benchmarks and turn the gap in your numbers into action steps and directions worth exploring.

Identify areas of improvement

The whole point of a brand competitor analysis is finding the gaps in your own strategy so you can grow from them. 

This includes positioning gaps, underserved audiences, and content voids, basically anywhere your strategy is falling behind compared to where your competitors are at.

Maybe every competitor in your space is active on TikTok, and you've stuck to Instagram only, leaving an entire audience segment untouched. Maybe your messaging leans heavily on price, while every competitor has shifted toward sustainability, and that's the conversation your shared audience now cares about. 

Translate findings into strategic actions

Every competitor's strategy analysis should end with a handful of action points for your next quarter.

Say you notice a content pillar that every competitor is actively using, but you've barely touched. Before adding it to your calendar, check whether it actually fits your brand's positioning. If it does, start testing it in your content plan and track how your audience responds.

Don't try to act on every gap at once, though. Prioritize based on your quarterly business goals, test a few ideas at a time, and give each one enough room to show results. 

How to turn brand competitive analysis into strategic decisions?

Data only matters if you do something with it afterward. Turning raw numbers into instructions is my favorite part, but it takes a bit of mental acrobatics to get there. 

Here's how to make your brand competitive analysis data work for you.

From insight to action: three types of moves

This framework is rather simple but effective. Every finding from your analysis falls into one of three moves: reinforce, differentiate, or counter. 

• Reinforcing means strengthening a position that's already working. If your benchmarking shows your engagement rate beats the niche average, don't chase something new. Double down instead.
• Differentiating means setting your brand apart with something competitors don't have or haven't claimed yet. This doesn't have to be a product feature: it can be your tone of voice, your format choices, or the angle you take on a shared topic.
• Countering means responding directly to a competitor's move that's pulling attention or audience away from you. This is reactive by nature, but it should still be deliberate, not panic-posting because a competitor went viral.

Sort your findings this way before you touch your content calendar. This will help you classify the changes you’re looking for and prioritize them. 

How to use competitive analysis to inform your content strategy

Your content is where brand positioning becomes visible. A stakeholder can talk about differentiation in a strategy deck, but your audience only ever experiences it through what shows up in their feed.

So when your competitor brand analysis turns up a gap or an opportunity, content is among the core areas that insight has to land.

Say your content pillar analysis shows three competitors regularly posting about sustainability, but you’ve never touched the topic. Before you throw it in the mix, think: why is this content pillar not there yet?

If your brand has nothing credible to say about sustainability or it doesn’t fit your narrative, the pillar clearly won’t perform the same way it does for competitor brands. But if it fits, build it out: a recurring angle, a handful of formats, a few weeks of content to test the pillar on your audience. 

Same logic applies to format and channels, but channels tend to have a bit more at stake. 

Before moving budget toward a new platform just because a competitor is doing it, check if your audience is there, and if you have enough production power to successfully cater to it. 

Competitor brand may be killing it on TikTok, but if you have neither the audience nor the capacity to create enough short-form videos, sheer presence on the platform won’t work the same magic. 

Tone and messaging are the slowest to shift, and the easiest to get wrong, so approach these competitive insights with special care. 

If sentiment data shows a competitor's more casual, human voice is landing better than your formal one, test it in a low-stakes format first. Start with captions or community replies, and watch whether engagement or sentiment moves before you touch anything more permanent.

Final thoughts

Analysis of competitors' strategies can tell you a lot about how to sharpen your brand positioning and how to communicate it to your audience. 

However, treat all your brand competitive analysis insights as theories to explore, not necessarily imperative changes. 

Socialinsider helps you run competition analysis and benchmark your performance against other brands in detail. Try it free for 14 days and see what action points come out of it for your next quarter.

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FAQs on brand competitive analysis

How to identify which competitors are actually winning in your category (not just the obvious ones)?

Skip the follower count. Search your category keywords, pain points, and use cases directly on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Note which brands or creators keep showing up with high saves, comments, or shares. These brands might not be the biggest, but they are on the top of your audience’s mind. 

What are some common mistakes that make brand competitive analysis overly complicated?

Among the most common brand competitive analysis mistakes are:

• Mistaking audience size for brand strength — how engaged the audience really is usually matters more than the follower count. 
• Only looking at platforms you're already active on — you might miss a more beneficial platform entirely simply because you haven’t considered it. 
• Copying what competitors do well without understanding why it works for them — repeating the same format or script won't guarantee the same result. Find the reason behind their success and adapt that formula to your own brand.