Discover the best way to conduct a competitive analysis.
spAs social media trends continue to change, brands strive to outdo one another. Staying ahead of your competition is crucial for driving continued success.
If you want to level up your marketing strategy in 2025 and beyond, it’s time to leverage the power of competitor analysis tools. These tools compile the vast amounts of data available about your competition, making it much easier to compare performance, dig into their social media strategies and spot industry trends.
Broadly, the goal of any competitive analysis is to gather insights into what your competitors are doing, what they’re doing well and identify opportunities to improve your social media marketing strategy. These analyses gather insights across social media, website traffic and more to:
As all social media managers know, it can be extremely easy to fall into a comfortable routine regarding your content calendar. A competitive analysis pushes you out of that comfort zone to showcase what other brands in your niche are doing, how it’s working for them and how it could also work for you. These analyses are also great for catching industry trends in the early stages.
As mentioned previously, the point of an analysis is to see what your competition is doing right and how you can emulate that with your own brand's unique spin. It’s a great way to stay in touch with what is going on in your niche and identify your brand's strengths and weaknesses.
Conducting a competitive analysis will help you identify industry trends within your niche. Whether or not these are right for your brand, developing an understanding of social media trends gives you a better knowledge of your industry and how these trends shape your business.
Identifying which social media benchmarks larger and smaller competitors reach will help you define your own. This gives you an idea of how smaller brands are newly entering your industry while looking at larger brands helps your team identify opportunities for growth and how you can scale your social strategy as your business grows.
Overall, performing a competitive analysis is crucial to discover new opportunities and preventing your social media strategy — and presence — from going stale. While we don’t recommend directly copying your competitors’ creative assets, looking at how they optimize their profiles using social media SEO, which products they promote and which social channels they show up on benefits your social strategy and overall online presence.
As you can see, competitor research and analysis can be done in a variety of ways. When searching for competitor analysis tools, you may come across a wide range of options specializing in different areas such as:
Leveraging the right tool, your analyses can be much more efficient and informed with valuable insights. However, with so many options out there, it can be challenging to choose the best one for your needs. In this article, we’ve compiled the top 10 competitor analysis solutions — from social media management, to social listening and keyword tools — to help you stand out and stay ahead of the competition.
Pros:
Cons:
Dash Social’s Competitive Insights and Benchmarking offers in-depth competitive analysis tools for social media platforms including Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and X (Twitter). With Dash Social, you can monitor competitor performance on key platforms and benchmark against industry averages to see how you perform relevant to your niche. Plus, its visually focused insights are perfect for digging into competitor content.Dash Social is well-suited for brands that rely on visual-first social media channels and are looking to stay ahead of the competition.
Pros:
Cons:
Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform with solutions for publishing, reporting and community management. It also offers competitive benchmarking tools for Facebook, Instagram and X (Twitter) to easily measure your competitor’s social media activity and compare your average performance against competitors with insights into audience growth, engagement metrics and post volume. If you’re a social media manager who needs to report on competitors’ social media performance in the same place you’re managing your social media channels, Sprout Social is a good choice.
Pros:
Cons:
Phlanx is a helpful calculator that determines an account’s engagement rate. This is a great, simple way to quickly find a competitor’s engagement rate and compare it against your own. If you’re looking to compare against multiple competitors, they also offer a simplified graph to track the engagement rate of each competitor’s most recent posts. Despite its limited capabilities and metrics, Phlanx is a useful resource if you just need a number to benchmark your performance against.
Pros:
Cons:
Social Blade is a public database of social media analytics that can be used for competitor tracking on YouTube, Twitch, Instagram and X (Twitter). It offers a free and easy way to perform quick high-level analyses of channel performance and the ability to compare multiple competitors against each other.
Although it lacks in-depth, private insights, Social Blade is a great option for social media marketers who are on a tight budget and need a quick glimpse into competitor performance.
Pros:
Cons:
Brandwatch is a competitor analysis and market research tool that allows you to benchmark your performance against competitors on key performance indicators such as audience growth, engagement and content performance across several social channels.
With its complex suite of features, Brandwatch is a solution designed primarily for enterprises that need deep insights into large datasets.
Pros:
Cons:
Rival IQ is a social media analytics tool that uses publicly available insights across a variety of channels for competitive research and benchmarking purposes. Getting started is relatively quick and simple, making it easy to start monitoring competitor activity and content.
Rival IQ is best suited for smaller teams looking to regularly monitor competitor social media performance.
Pros:
Cons:
Talkwalker is a consumer intelligence tool with social listening, monitoring and benchmarking tools available across a vast range of data sources for comprehensive coverage. It monitors competitors’ mentions on social media channels and other online platforms to help you understand how your competitors are perceived.
Talkwalker’s consumer insights are a strong choice, best suited for enterprise brands that have the budget and resources to take full advantage of its in-depth suite of features.
Pros:
Cons:
BuzzoSumo is a content research and analysis platform that offers tools like content discovery, influencer identification and media monitoring across multiple platforms, including web and social media. BuzzSumo makes it easy to find trending content among your competitors and analyze how well it’s engaging audiences on social media.
Although it's more content-focused than other, similar options out there, BuzzSumo is a great choice to stay on top of trends and discover new content ideas.
Pros:
Cons:
SEMRush is a popular SEO tool that also offers features for tracking competitor keywords, backlinks, site traffic and more. This is a valuable resource to advise your content strategy by helping you better understand competitor performance from a primarily SEO perspective.
Although SEMRush can track social media activity, its strengths are best suited for content marketers looking to conduct competitive keyword and SEO analysis.
Pros:
Cons:
Crayon is a dedicated competitive intelligence platform that tracks your competitors’ complete online presence. It monitors and compiles real-time competitor activity across a wide variety of sources including website updates, job postings, press releases and more. Using Crayon, you can create customizable reports, dashboards and battle cards about your competitors.
Crayon includes significant depth and a robust feature set to help you stay on top of what your competitors are up to in the market, making it best suited for sales-focused competitive analysis.
With so many tools available for various purposes, be sure to pick the one that specializes in the area you need most. When evaluating your options, it’s always important to consider other factors like coverage across the channels you need, data accuracy, ease of use and quality of customer support.
A newsletter you’ll actually want to open
Join our community of experts to stay informed and get social media resources sent directly to your inbox.