A competitor's Reel is doing numbers, your manager has sent it to the team channel with "can we do something like this?", and you have until Friday. Copying it is the fast answer, but the post worked for reasons that belong to their account. What transfers is smaller and more useful: which formats and openings keep turning up across several accounts your buyers follow, and which parts of your offer nobody in the field has filmed. That's what competitor analysis is for an account deciding what to post. Below: the ways teams do it, what to look at, what to ignore, and how to tell reading from copying.
How teams do this today
By hand: scroll their profiles, keep a folder
Someone on the team watches the rivals' recent posts and saves the good ones to a shared folder or a spreadsheet, with a line on why each worked.
Good for: someone on your team actually watches the videos, and the reason a post held people is in the video: the opening, the format, what's on screen. Where it breaks: it works for a handful of accounts and falls apart past that, and it's the first thing dropped in a busy week. A folder you last updated in spring is a photograph of a field that has moved.
A competitor-tracking tool
Hootsuite tracks competitors' "posts, posting frequency, follower growth, engagement rate, and more" (Hootsuite); its Standard plan, at "$99 per user/month, billed annually", covers up to 5 competitors and Professional up to 20 (plans). Sprout Social's competitor reports track "audience growth, engagement and post volume for each network" (Sprout Social); the extensive competitor reporting is in its Professional plan, at "$299 per seat/month" (pricing). Rival IQ alerts you "when your competitors post high-performing content", from "$239/mo" (Rival IQ, pricing).
Good for: coverage and consistency: many accounts, every week, with alerts when something takes off. Where it breaks: they mostly tell you which posts did well; the why is in the video, and someone still has to watch it and work out what to take. And they're priced per seat or per tracked account, so a wide set gets expensive.
An agency audit
An agency or consultant reviews the field and hands over a deck.
Good for: a thorough, outside view, often with a recommendation attached. Where it breaks: if it's a one-off, it's a snapshot, and the field keeps moving after the deck is delivered.
A research tool that watches the videos
Rankfield takes this job on: it watches your competitors' videos, finds accounts like yours you hadn't named, and turns the patterns it sees into scenarios for your own offer.
Good for: the watching that tracking tools leave to you, across more accounts than one person keeps up with, every week. Where it breaks: like any outside read, it sees public posts only, never a rival's analytics or ad spend, and it's a paid tool once the free audit is done.
Whichever route you take, the job underneath is the same: pattern-reading, not post-reading. One post from one account is an anecdote. The same format turning up on four accounts your buyers follow is a pattern. You're looking for patterns, and for the gaps between them.
Who counts as a competitor on social media?
A competitor on social is any account that competes for the same person's attention and the same decision, which is wider than the list your sales team would write. The set has three kinds of member:
- Direct rivals. They sell what you sell to the people you sell to.
- Adjacent accounts. They sell something near yours, to the same people, and their audience is the one you want to reach. A gym and a meal-prep service, a design studio and a software tool for designers.
- Accounts your buyers watch for pleasure. These are not selling against you at all. They show which formats and openings your buyers already stay for.
Keep the set small. A competitor set of a handful of accounts is enough to see a pattern, and small enough that you will actually watch the videos rather than skim a dashboard. If you manage several client accounts, build one set per client; the sets are not interchangeable, and a set borrowed from another client produces the wrong gaps.
A fast test for whether an account belongs: would a person who is about to buy from you plausibly be following it? If yes, it is in the field. If you cannot picture the overlap in audience, leave it out.
What to look for when you watch
Five things you can see from the outside without misreading them.
The format. Talking to camera, a screen recording, a before-and-after, a walk-through, a customer story, a quick demonstration. Across a few accounts, the formats your field has settled on become obvious, and so does the one nobody uses.
The opening. The hook is the part of a video the viewer decides on, and it's the easiest part to compare across accounts. Notice whether the field opens with a question, a claim, a result or a face, and whether anyone opens differently.
What's on screen. The product, a person, a process, text, a screen. An account that never shows the product is making a choice, and the choice is information.
Which part of the offer. Which things they sell keep coming back on camera, and which never appear. It's the same gap you'd look for on your own account, pointed outward.
Rhythm. How often they post, and how steady it is. A steady account that posts less often than you is telling you something different from an erratic one that posts more.
What can you ignore on a competitor's account?
You can ignore most of what feels important, because it is either unreadable from outside or does not transfer to your account.
Their follower count. It describes years of history, paid reach and luck, and it does not tell you what an audience like yours responds to this month. A smaller account with a clear pattern is more instructive than a large one with a lucky post.
Their single best post. One result is noise. If the same format appears in the top posts of several accounts, that is worth a note. One lucky video from one account is not.
Their topics, taken whole. Topics belong to the account that earned the right to them. What you read is the shape around the topic — the format, the opening, the pacing — and then you fill that shape with something only you sell.
Their numbers as a benchmark for yours. Another account's engagement rate is measured against a different audience, a different history and often a different definition. Your own baseline is the number that tells you whether a post worked. Use the field to decide what to try and your own history to decide whether it worked.
How do you tell reading from copying?
You are reading when the output of your session is a gap you found and a video only you can film. You are copying when the output is a video that would make sense on their account.
Three checks separate the two in practice:
- Does the post contain something only you sell, know or can show? If you could swap their logo in and it would still work, you copied.
- Did you take a shape, or a sentence? Shapes transfer: a short-shot structure, a result-first opening, a walk-through. Sentences do not.
- Would it have an answer to "why would someone follow you instead of them"? A video that is a weaker version of theirs does not.
The reason this discipline pays is that the field is crowded with copies. Accounts that read each other and copy the same formats end up indistinguishable, and the audience has no reason to choose one over another. The gap, the thing the field has not filmed, is where an account stops being interchangeable.
How do you turn a gap into something you can film this week?
A gap becomes a plan when it's narrowed to one offer, one format and one opening, in that order. Pick one part of your offer the field never films, and a format or opening that keeps working across the accounts you read. Check your own posts for the shapes you already do well, and keep those. Then write it down as a shot list: the opening, three shots, the line you say. That's where reading ends and deciding what to film next takes over. Whether the pick was right is something you only learn after posting, which is the subject of is your content working?
How often should you re-read the field?
Often enough to notice a shift, rarely enough that you are not just watching. A field does not change weekly, but your read of it should be fresh when you plan. Re-watch the set when you start a new run of videos, when a result surprises you, or when an account you follow changes how it posts. If you only ever read the field once, you are working from a photograph.
A caution that belongs in the open: this is a method for one person, and it has limits. You can watch a handful of accounts well. You cannot watch fifty, and you cannot see inside anyone's analytics. What you read is a public surface, and you read it for patterns, not for proof. Treat each pattern as a thing to try, check it against your own results, and drop it if it does not hold for your audience.
Questions
How do I do a social media competitor analysis?
Pick a small set of accounts your buyers could choose instead of you and watch their recent posts, looking for the formats and openings that keep turning up, what is on screen, and which parts of their offer they film. What they film and you never have is the gap; what they film and you already do better is the part you leave alone.
How many competitors should I look at?
A handful is enough to see a pattern without it becoming a second job. One account tells you about one team’s habits, not about the field. Past a handful you stop watching the videos and start skimming the numbers.
Is it copying if I use what a competitor does?
Copying a post is taking their topic and their words. Reading an account is noticing which format and which opening hold attention in front of an audience like yours, then filming your own offer in that shape. The first leaves you as a weaker version of them; the second leaves you with something they have not filmed.