You open a competitor’s account, scroll the grid, see 40K followers next to your 6K and close the app feeling slightly worse. A week later you do it again. No conclusions, just an urge to “do what they do”: borrow their colors, shoot the same kind of Reels.
That’s not analysis, it’s peeking. Real competitor analysis answers three questions: which topics and formats work for them, what they promise customers, and where the gaps are that you could fill. All of it is visible in public sources — no scraped databases, fake accounts or shady tools required.
Below: who to put on the list, which free tools to use, a 12-field sheet, and a routine that takes two hours the first time and 30 minutes a month after that.
Who counts as a competitor: three lists
The classic mistake is picking the market leader and benchmarking only against them. They have a different budget, a different history and possibly an inflated audience. Build three short lists instead:
| List | Who goes on it | What to study |
|---|---|---|
| Direct, 3–5 accounts | Same product, same city or same audience | Offer, prices, promos, path to purchase |
| Attention, 2–3 | Different niche, same audience: for a coffee shop in Austin — local food creators and city media | Formats, delivery, topics your people react to |
| Benchmark, 2–3 | The best in your niche in another market: London, Melbourne, Seoul | Ideas that haven’t reached your market yet |
That’s 8–12 accounts total. You don’t need more: by profile number forty your attention is gone and the sheet is still empty.
Where to find direct competitors if “there’s nobody like us”: Instagram and TikTok search by keyword plus city, Google Maps and Yelp listings with social links, “similar accounts” suggestions, and the ads you get served after searching for your own service.
Legal tools: what you can see for free
One rule: only look at what the company shows everyone.
- Meta Ad Library. Every active ad from any Facebook or Instagram page, with its start date. The key signal is longevity: an ad that has been running for over a month is probably profitable, otherwise someone would have switched it off. Note which offers and formats survive longest. For ads shown in the EU you also get reach and audience age.
- “About this account” on Instagram. Tap the three dots on a profile: date joined, country, former usernames, active ads. An account with 40K followers that was created five months ago and renamed three times was most likely bought or inflated.
- The Reels tab. View counts sit on every video right in the grid. It’s the most honest public metric there is and shows instantly what took off.
- YouTube. On a competitor’s channel open Videos or Shorts and sort by Popular. Top ten videos in five seconds. Social Blade adds subscriber history.
- TikTok Creative Center. The Top Ads section shows high-performing ads, filterable by industry, region and objective.
- LinkedIn Ad Library lets you search any company and see the ads it has run on the platform — gold for B2B.
- Google Ads Transparency Center shows any advertiser’s search and YouTube ads.
- Mystery shopping. Send a “How much is…?” DM on a weekday and on a Saturday evening, time the reply and save the script. That’s not spying — it’s what every customer does.
Paid tools like Sprout Social, Rival IQ or Metricool put competitor metrics in one dashboard and save time if you track more than ten accounts or report weekly. Sprout is the most complete of the three and priced accordingly; Metricool is the easiest on a small team’s budget. For the first pass, the free stack is enough.
What not to do: fake accounts to get into a competitor’s private groups, “scrapers” that harvest followers’ personal data, or mass-following their audience. It breaks platform rules and usually ends with your own account restricted.
The sheet: 12 fields per competitor
One row per account. If a field takes more than two minutes to fill, put a dash and move on.
- Account and the platforms where it’s actually active.
- Cadence: posts and Reels per week, Stories per day (monthly average).
- Format mix: Reels, carousels, photos, text.
- Content pillars: 3–5 recurring topics.
- Top three posts of the last 90 days by views or comments.
- Opening lines: five hooks, copied word for word.
- Offer: what they promise and which prices they state publicly.
- Path to purchase: DMs, link in bio, chatbot, website.
- Ads: running or not, which ones have lasted over a month.
- Speed and quality of the reply to your mystery DM.
- What people say in the comments: questions and complaints.
- What they do better than you and what they do worse — one line each.
Fields 11 and 12 are the most valuable and the most often skipped. Questions under a competitor’s posts are ready-made topics for yours. Complaints like “third time I’ve DMed, nobody answers” or “shipping took two weeks” are your advantage — worth putting right in your bio.
The outlier method: copy the pattern, not the post
An average competitor post tells you little. The signal is in the outliers. Take their last 20–30 Reels, estimate the median views and mark anything that got three times more. There are usually 2–4. For each, write one line on why it worked: topic, hook, format, length.
Example: a rival nail studio’s median is 1,500 views, but “3 mistakes that make your manicure chip in a week” hit 22,000. The takeaway isn’t “shoot the same video”. It’s “the ‘N mistakes’ format built on a specific customer pain works in our niche”. You shoot your own mistakes, with your own examples and words — copying neither the script nor the visuals.
When the same pattern shows up at two or three competitors, it’s not luck, it’s demand. Those topics go straight into your content plan.
Also sanity-check engagement: 40K followers and 30 likes per post isn’t a leader, it’s an account with a padded audience. To compare fairly, see how to calculate engagement rate honestly.
The routine: two hours now, 30 minutes a month
First pass, about two hours:
- 20 minutes — three lists, 8–12 accounts.
- 70–80 minutes — the sheet, roughly 8 minutes per account.
- 20 minutes — outliers and comments for direct competitors.
- 10 minutes — the output: three actions. One format to test, one topic, one fix to your own offer or profile.
Monthly, 30 minutes: new ads in the Ad Library, new outlier Reels, price and promo changes. Add to the same sheet instead of starting a new one, so you can see the trend.
Quarterly, run your own account through the same fields — it pairs well with a social media audit. “Me vs them” on one scale beats a folder of screenshots.
When competitor analysis backfires
- You’re copying a leader who grows on budget. Their reach may come from ads and brand recognition, not content. Check the Ad Library before copying their style.
- Your account is under three months old. Build your own baseline first: 30–40 posts and a feel for your audience. Otherwise you’ll bounce between other people’s strategies.
- Your competitors are weak too. In some local markets everyone does social equally badly. There’s nothing to learn — work from the benchmark list instead.
- Analysis replaces action. A 40-account spreadsheet without a single test launched is procrastination with a nice name.
- You adopt their voice. Their followers already follow them. You want the people who don’t like how they talk.
Checking competitors’ blogs and public Telegram channels by hand gets old fast. In Repost21 you can add them as sources in Idea Feed: fresh material arrives every morning with draft posts written in your tone, not theirs. Try it free.