A social media competitor analysis can reveal content gaps, uncover new opportunities, and show you where to focus your efforts. But only if you compare the right brands and platforms.
This guide shows you how to find those competitors, evaluate their social performance, and turn your findings into a practical plan, with a free template you can use to follow along.
What is a social media competitor analysis?
A social media competitor analysis is a recurring process for reviewing relevant competitors’ public social activity and performance over time. It helps you understand how your brand compares, identify gaps in your social media strategy, and decide what types of content to test next.
Running a competitive analysis for social media also allows you to:
- Benchmark your performance by showing where your follower or subscriber growth, posting activity, or visible interactions per post differ from relevant competitors.
- Find opportunities to stand out by identifying useful topics, formats, or audience needs that competitors may not be addressing well.
- Understand your audience better by reviewing the questions, reactions, and conversations competitors’ content attracts.
- Spot relevant trends before deciding whether they’re worth testing in your own social media strategy.
We recommend running a social media competitive analysis at least once a quarter to ensure you stay up to date with competitor and industry changes.
How to do a social media competitor analysis
To analyze competitors’ social media presence, compare relevant accounts on the same platforms over the same review period. Look at their audience growth, posting activity, and average visible interactions per post. Then note the patterns that could inform your own strategy.
You can record your notes, key insights, and top posts in our Social Media Competitor Analysis Template.
Use the Social Media Overview tab to keep your findings in one place.
The template is designed to keep the core analysis straightforward:
- The Social Media Overview tab lets you compare your brand with three to five competitors on each platform.
- The Snapshot History tab lets you save completed reviews, so you can compare activity and growth over time.
- The Top Posts tab gives you an optional place to save useful competitor posts, along with their format, hook strategy, topic, hashtags, and your notes.
- The SWOT Analysis tab is also optional. Use it to turn your strongest findings into a small number of practical actions.
If this is your first time running the process, start small. Focus on a small number of platforms, ideally where your audience and competitors are active, or that you are actively posting on. Then, follow these steps.
Step 1: Build your competitor list
Most social media competitor analyses begin with a familiar shortlist of the brands your team sees most often.
It’s a useful starting point, but it isn’t a finished competitor list since you might miss fast-growing rivals and new players.
Use Semrush’s Traffic & Market Toolkit to expand and test that shortlist. Enter your domain in the Market Overview report to find potential competitors, then decide which ones belong in your social media analysis. Our guide to digital marketing competitor analysis shows how to use the same toolkit beyond social.
Timbertrain’s report shows why this check matters.
It identifies gardentabs.com as a key player with 12.56% market share, but GardenTabs is an online resource guide dedicated to gardening (not a coffee roaster). It may compete for search traffic, but it is not a useful social media performance benchmark, so you would leave it off Timbertrain’s competitor list.
The Growth Quadrant widget also surfaces businesses based on traffic volume and growth rate. It breaks down your competitors into four categories:
- Game Changers: Emerging businesses with lower traffic but high growth rates
- Leaders: Businesses with high traffic and high growth rates
- Niche Players: Businesses with lower traffic and lower growth rates
- Established Players: Businesses with high traffic and lower growth rates
For Timbertrain, the report places Roasty Coffee in the Established Players quadrant. Roasty is a coffee brand competing for the same topics, and it’s easy to miss when your shortlist is the coffee brands you already know, like Lucky Goat Coffee. Timbertrain, Lucky Goat, and Roasty Coffee are the example set for the rest of this guide.
Treat every domain the report finds as a candidate, rather than an automatic social media competitor.
Market Overview only finds businesses with website traffic. To find social-first competitors, also search two or three core keywords on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Note which brand accounts appear repeatedly in those results, then add them to your candidate list.
It’s often better to narrow your analysis to direct business competitors. These are businesses that offer similar products or services to the same type of customer as you. They provide a more useful benchmark than publishers, creators, or brands that compete only for attention.
Start with three to five direct competitors. Then add those brands to the relevant platform sections in the Social Media Overview tab of the template.
Step 2: Pick the platforms worth analyzing
You do not need to analyze every social platform your competitors use. Comparing too many platforms usually leads to a thin analysis with plenty of data but few useful conclusions.
Instead, choose a small number of platforms where your audience is active, your direct competitors have a meaningful presence, and your brand could realistically create content consistently.
Use the Audience Profile dashboard in Semrush’s Traffic & Market toolkit to make that decision. Add your domain and relevant competitors, then open the Behavior report in the Audience Profile section.
Review the social platforms that are most relevant to the audiences visiting those sites.
For instance, by analyzing Timbertrain’s audience, we can see they’re mainly active on Instagram, Reddit and LinkedIn.
Repeat the check for each competitor to see which platforms keep showing up. For Timbertrain, Instagram is the clear pick. It leads the audience data, Lucky Goat and Timbertrain both publish there, and Social Tracker supports it. LinkedIn also shows up, but Social Tracker doesn’t cover it, so we’ll leave it out of this example.
You might leave Reddit out of this particular analysis.
Reddit still matters, though. It ranked third in Google AI Mode and first in Perplexity in our study of the most-cited domains in AI search, so what people say about a brand there shapes how AI search describes it. Community participation also works differently from managing a brand profile, which would blur a side-by-side comparison. Check Reddit through Media Monitoring in Step 5 instead.
Choose platforms that meet these four criteria:
- Your audience uses the platform: Semrush’s Audience Profile report should indicate that the platform is relevant to the people your competitors attract.
- Your direct competitors are active there: Your competitors need enough public activity to make a useful comparison.
- Your brand can invest in the platform: Do not prioritize a channel solely because competitors use it if you do not have the resources to participate consistently.
- You can get comparable data: Social Tracker covers Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. If you choose TikTok or X, you’ll need to collect the numbers by hand.
Add your chosen platforms to the Social Media Overview tab in the template.
Use one platform section for each network, and compare your brand with three to five direct competitors.
Review your platform choices during each quarterly analysis. Audience behavior, competitor activity, and your own capacity can change over time.
Set up Social Tracker
If you plan to compare Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Pinterest profiles, set up Semrush’s Social Tracker now. Add your competitors’ domains and confirm the social profiles you want to analyze.
Social Tracker looks back 60 days when you add a profile (30 days for YouTube), and data builds from that day forward. A quarterly review covers about 90 days, so add your profiles as soon as you've picked them.
Step 3: Decide which metrics to track
Choose a small set of metrics to compare competitors and decide what to test next.
Track the same metrics across the same time period for your brand and each direct competitor, so the comparison is fair and meaningful.
The Social Media Overview tab in the template covers some core brand and profile metrics.
The Top Posts tab helps you capture metrics for specific content examples worth looking at more closely.
You can also add metrics to the template. In general, the types of metrics you should consider tracking fall into these categories.
Audience size
Start with each account’s follower or subscriber count at the end of the review period. This shows the size of the audience a brand can reach through its profile.
You can gather this metric manually from each profile, or by using Semrush Social.
Don’t treat follower count as a measure of success on its own.
A large account may have built its audience years ago and no longer be growing or generating much interaction. Check the date of the last post and recent engagement to see whether the account is active.
A smaller competitor that is consistently gaining followers and attracting responses to its posts may be the more useful benchmark than a large competitor with little to no activity.
In your template, record both the total number of followers or subscribers and the number gained or lost during the review period when that data is available.
If you have data from past competitor analyses, subtract last quarter’s follower count from this quarter’s to calculate audience growth.
For profiles tracked in Social Tracker, use the Comparison With Competitors table to find Change and Growth for your selected period.
For platforms you track by hand, leave the field blank unless you have a previous follower count to compare.
Posting frequency
Record how many posts each competitor published during the review period and their average number of posts per week.
This helps you understand how active competitors are, but more posting does not automatically mean better results. A competitor publishing every day may receive less interaction per post than one publishing twice a week.
Look for the balance between activity and audience response.
For example, over the past 28 days Lucky Goat posted 11 times on Instagram and averaged 167.8 engagements per post, while Timbertrain posted 7 times and averaged 25.3. Lucky Goat posted four more times but earned more than six times the engagement per post, so volume alone doesn’t explain the gap. Step 4 looks at what they posted.
That said, the volume of posts your competitors publish shouldn't be the only factor affecting your content cadence. Go at the speed your time and budget allow and work your way up to what makes sense for your brand and audience as you grow.
Engagement rate
Engagement rate shows how much engagement a profile receives relative to its audience size. It can help you identify which competitor accounts and content types are worth investigating further.
The standard engagement-rate formula is:
Total engagements ÷ follower count × 100
This produces a percentage. It gives more context than total likes or comments alone, especially when you compare accounts with different audience sizes.
Semrush’s Social Tracker uses a different calculation for Facebook and Instagram:
Total engagement ÷ number of posts ÷ audience size × 10,000
This rate is not a percentage, so a score above 100 is normal. For example, a rate of 161.8 reflects the Social Tracker calculation; it does not mean the account has a 161.8% engagement rate.
You can read it as an average of 161.8 engagements per post for every 10,000 people in the audience.
Engagement-related metrics help you track how active an audience is, so you can prioritize which profiles and content types to review in your analysis.
Use the Semrush Social Tracker to compare audience size, activity, and engagement across the competitors you selected.
Compare engagement rates only between accounts on the same platform, over the same date range, and using the same tool. For example, do not compare a Facebook engagement rate with a YouTube metric, because platforms and tools measure interactions differently.
Content performance
Post metrics tell you where to investigate. The content itself helps you understand why. Use performance data to identify competitor posts worth a closer look.
In Step 4, review those posts’ format, content pillar, hook, copy, and call to action, then save useful examples in the Top Posts tab of the template.
Step 4: Analyze their content and posting patterns
Now look at what your competitors are posting. This helps you understand the choices behind their performance, beyond which accounts receive the most visible engagement.
Start by grouping each competitor’s posts into a few recurring content pillars. These are the themes they return to regularly.
For a coffee brand, content pillars might include coffee education, product promotions, behind-the-scenes roasting, and community or lifestyle content. Within each pillar, consider whether posts are informational, aspirational, entertaining, or promotional. Tagging a quarter’s worth of posts by pillar and format is slow by hand, so have an AI assistant do a first pass. Our guide to AI tools for competitor analysis shows how.
Also review each competitor’s format mix. Note how much of their output is short-form video, carousels, static images, and other formats.
For example, a competitor might use short-form video to show its roasting process, carousels to share brewing advice or recipe ideas, and static images to announce a new product.
Use Social Tracker to review competitors’ posts on each platform over a selected time period. Then save useful examples in the Top Posts tab of the template.
For each post, consider:
- The post link and creative: Save the post URL, caption, and image or thumbnail so you can revisit the full post and see how the message and visuals work together.
- The format and content pillar: Is it a short-form video, carousel, static image, or another format? What recurring theme does it support?
- The hook, copy, and visual approach: How does the post capture attention? Does it use a question, customer problem, product demonstration, surprising claim, or relatable scenario?
- The call to action and hashtags: Does the post ask people to comment, save, share, visit a product page, or make a purchase? Are the hashtags branded, topical, or location-based?
- The likely shelf life and key takeaway: Is the idea evergreen, seasonal, or tied to a short-lived trend? Record the specific pattern you may want to investigate.
Consider ClickUp’s “When the HR meeting goes too hard” reel.
You could classify it as a workplace-culture content pillar, a short-form video format, and a relatable-humor hook. Its caption directs viewers to earlier posts in the series, while #corporatehumor and #officehumor position it within a familiar conversation.
The takeaway is not to copy the post. It shows how a B2B brand can use entertaining, non-product content to build familiarity with its audience.
Record that observation in the “What stands out?” field, then decide whether a similar brand-building approach is worth testing.
Don’t assume every popular post is a repeatable success. If a post’s engagement is far above the account’s usual level, search the brand in Meta Ad Library to see whether it's running as an ad. The library lists ads that are active now, so a boost that has already ended may not appear.
A post may also perform well because it features a partner or responds to a short-lived trend. Treat every top post as a hypothesis to test, not a tactic to copy.
Finally, compare competitors’ posting cadence. Use Social Tracker to see your competition’s posting frequency and the days of the week people engage with their content.
Look at how often they publish, whether their activity is consistent, and when their stronger posts tend to appear.
Step 5: Benchmark your numbers against competitors
Use the data you collected in the previous steps to establish directional benchmarks. The goal is to understand how your brand compares with direct competitors on the same platform, over the same date range.
Head-to-head social profile comparison
Use Semrush’s Social Tracker to compare your brand and competitors side by side.
Open the Overview report and set the same date range you used in the template. Then review the Audience, Activity, and Engagement comparisons.
For a closer look, open the relevant platform report and select “All profiles.”
You can then compare competitors’ post activity and review metrics such as reactions, comments, shares, and total engagement where available.
Compare brand conversations and sentiment
Social profile metrics show what competitors publish and how audiences visibly respond. Social listening helps you understand what people say and the overall sentiment toward those brands elsewhere online.
Sentiment is the overall tone of a mention or conversation about a brand. It is usually classified as positive, neutral, or negative.
For example, a customer posting “Best light roast I’ve found, and it showed up in two days” is a positive mention. A comment saying “I like the beans, but my order took two weeks to arrive” may be negative or mixed.
Looking at sentiment across several mentions can help you spot recurring perceptions of each brand, such as praise for flavor, frustration with shipping times, or confusion about subscription options.
Use the Media Monitoring app to track mentions of your brand and selected competitors. It comes with the Social Toolkit Business plan.
Set up a project or query for your company and relevant competitors. Then open the Mentions section to review what people are saying about each brand. Pay particular attention to social-media mentions, including Reddit threads, recurring questions, complaints, and topics people associate with each competitor. Then work out share of voice, which is your brand’s share of all mentions across the group you track. Media Monitoring gives you the counts, so divide your mentions by the total for every brand in the group.
You can filter by sentiment in this section. You can also use the Analysis section to visually compare mention trends, sentiment, estimated reach, and online presence over time.
Sentiment is a useful signal, but it is not a final verdict. Review the mentions behind the chart before deciding whether a competitor has a stronger or weaker brand perception.
Compare estimated website traffic from organic social
Use the Organic Social dashboard in Traffic & Market to compare the estimated website traffic competitors receive from unpaid social activity.
Review the Traffic Trend, Top Growing Pages, and Top Sources reports to see which social sources appear to drive visits to competitor sites.
This answers a different question from Social Tracker. Social Tracker focuses on activity and engagement on social profiles. Organic Social shows estimated website visits from unpaid social links.
Use these findings directionally.
Third-party traffic estimates can help you identify patterns and content opportunities, but use your own web analytics to assess your actual social traffic, conversions, and revenue.
Step 6: Run a SWOT analysis
Once you have reviewed your competitors’ profiles, content, and performance, summarize the most useful findings in a SWOT analysis.
Use the SWOT Analysis tab in the template to turn observations into a small number of decisions.
Add evidence beside each point, such as a metric from the Social Media Overview tab, a saved Top Post, or a recurring pattern from your content review.
- Strengths are areas where your brand meets or exceeds relevant competitors. For example, Timbertrain's follower count (15,523) is well ahead of Roasty Coffee's (1,090).
- Weaknesses are areas that may need attention. You might find that your follower growth has slowed, your posting schedule is inconsistent, or competitors receive more meaningful comments on similar content. For example, Timbertrain averages 25.3 engagements per post on Instagram, against Lucky Goat's 167.8.
- Opportunities are gaps worth testing. For example, competitors may focus on a narrow audience segment, overlook a platform your audience uses, or leave common audience questions unanswered. For example, Lucky Goat's top posts are store-opening announcements, so Timbertrain could test an announcement-style post for its next launch.
- Threats are competitor activities or market changes that could make it harder to reach your goals. A competitor may be growing quickly, consistently publishing high-engagement content, or becoming strongly associated with a topic your brand also wants to own. For example, Lucky Goat posts more often and earns far more engagement per post, which could pull attention from the same coffee drinkers.
Keep the analysis evidence-based. A competitor’s public activity can suggest a hypothesis, but it does not prove why a result occurred or guarantee that the same approach will work for your brand.
Step 7: Use findings to refine your strategy
Use your analysis to make a small number of focused changes to your social media strategy so you can improve your performance.
Start with the patterns that appeared across multiple competitors or posts. Then turn each pattern into an original test with a clear goal, owner, success measure, and review date.
For example, you might:
- Test a platform or audience opportunity if competitors are not creating useful content for a relevant audience segment. Do not shift budget or resources permanently until your own results support the change.
- Adjust your posting cadence if competitors publish consistently and their audiences regularly respond. Start with a schedule your team can maintain rather than matching the highest-volume competitor.
- Test a new content format or pillar if competitor posts show that an audience responds to a topic your brand can address with a distinctive perspective.
- Reduce effort on a weak format if it underperforms across the category and your own analytics also show it is not contributing to your goals.
Use the Action Plan section of the SWOT tab to document each decision.
3 Social media competitor analysis tools
Before choosing a tool, consider whether it covers the platforms you selected, how many competitor profiles it allows you to track, and if it provides organic profile data, paid-ad data, website-traffic data, or a combination of these.
Semrush
The Semrush Social Toolkit tracks your profiles and your competitors' profiles on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. Instagram profiles need to be Business profiles to be tracked. Media Monitoring and the Organic Social dashboard in Traffic & Market add social listening and estimated website traffic from social.
- Use Social Tracker to compare audience size, publishing activity, engagement, posts, and selected competitor profiles.
- Use Media Monitoring to review competitor mentions, sources, and automated sentiment.
- Use the Organic Social dashboard in Traffic & Market to investigate estimated website visits from unpaid social sources.
Competitor limits depend on your plan. Base ($20 a month) tracks up to 10 competitor profiles, enough for five competitors on two platforms. Pro ($40 a month) and Business ($250 a month) track up to 20. Business is the plan that includes Media Monitoring, with 10 keywords to monitor.
Meta Ad Library
Meta Ad Library is a free transparency tool for reviewing competitors’ currently active ads across Meta technologies.
Search for a competitor’s Page name or a relevant keyword. Then review the visible creative, copy, format, platform placement, and run dates. Record the country and the date you checked the library because active-ad results can change.
Meta Ad Library is useful for studying positioning and creative patterns. It doesn’t show a typical ad’s budget, targeting, conversions, or return on ad spend. The exceptions are ads about social issues, elections, or politics, which show spend and impression ranges, and ads delivered in the EU, which show reach and some targeting.
TikTok Creative Center
TikTok Creative Center is a free public resource for researching trends and ad creative. Its Top Ads library includes advertiser-authorized, high-performing examples that you can filter by factors such as region, industry, objective, format, and time frame.
Use it to study recurring creative choices, such as opening hooks, product demonstrations, pacing, offers, and calls to action. Review several examples before recording a pattern.
Establish your social media competitor analysis cadence
Run a full competitor analysis once per quarter. Use the same review window, platforms, core metrics, and competitor list where possible. This makes it easier to identify meaningful changes rather than reacting to one unusual post or short-term fluctuation.
Between quarterly reviews, use lightweight monitoring to stay aware of major changes.
You might review new posts from key competitors, save notable examples in the Top Posts tab, and set Media Monitoring alerts or digests for relevant competitor names and topics.
Run an off-cycle analysis when a competitor launches a major product or campaign, a new brand begins gaining attention in your category, or a competitor makes a clear change to its platform, content, or publishing strategy.
Start with the template and a short list of competitors and platforms, then put your first quarterly review on the calendar.
