Social media competitive intelligence: Tools and tips

What’s the role of social media in competitive intelligence?

If anyone has ever told you it’s negligible, don’t listen to ‘em. Social media is fertile ground for many a competitive intel pro. It’s simple, accessible, ethical, and fast. 💨

In fact, according to the 2024 State of Competitive Intelligence Report, social media is the second most popular source of competitive intel, with 9% of CI pros leaning on it.

In this article, we’ll take you through the ins and outs of social media competitive intelligence and how to use it to get staggering results.

We cover:

• What social media competitive analysis is.
• Why and how social media works as an intel source.
• Exactly how to monitor competitors on social media, and what to do with that info.
• Social media's advantages over other CI sources.
• The best tools for keeping track of your competitors’ social media activity.

What is social media competitive analysis?

Ever analyzed your competitors via social media? If you have, you’ve done a social media competitive analysis. Potentially without even knowing it. 😉

The thing is, social media is an incredibly powerful tool for gathering information on competing businesses. Used properly, you can follow and filter information according to your favorite strategic framework.

Or, you can just collect as much intel as possible, and save it for your next formal analysis.

Why social media competitive intelligence works

One of the first steps of any competitive intelligence program is figuring out who the competition actually are.

“Obvious!” you cry. Well, yes. But social media is great for this. It shows you which other vendors are active on the same talking points as you, on the same platforms as you, within the same communities as you.

But it’s also a great source of CI for a number of other reasons:

1. It helps you prioritize your competitors into tiers.
2. It helps you figure out a competitor’s social media strategy.
3. It gives you insights into competitors’ other, overarching strategies (like messaging).
4. It shows you their favorite talking points and most effective conversation starters.
5. It gives you a built-in means of tracking the above talking points via hashtags.
6. Competitor posts give you a yardstick of success for your own social posts.
7. You get a sense of each competitor’s share of voice in your industry.

As Alexis Dinac, Product Marketing Manager at Labster, notes… 

“There are some channels where people are so bluntly honest it's absolutely gold. This is the power of social media. In fact, I don't think competitive intelligence research can be complete without social listening.”

How to monitor your competitors on social media in 5 steps

Step one: Identify the competition

Again, obvious. But crucial!

Roll your eyes all you want. We know you’ve done this already. But it’s best practice to re-do (or at least reaffirm) your prioritized list of competitors at regular intervals.

If you’re starting from scratch and don’t yet know who your competition are, you can get started by identifying businesses that sell similar products or services to you.

There are a couple of easy ways to get started:

First, there’s a lot you can get done online. A quick Google search is all you need to watch an afternoon fly by as you learn about the competition.

Step two: Prioritize your competitors by business value

So you’ve got a list of competitors. You’ve sense-checked it, refreshed it, or perhaps even built it from scratch. And you might not even have peeked at social media yet. 👁👄👁️

Don’t worry, we’re getting there – but we've got a point to make first.

You can only put your eggs in so many baskets. And since competitive intelligence teams tend to be small (but mighty), you want to make sure you’re allocating those finite resources appropriately.

Creating a competitor tier list

To assign these resources appropriately, it’s smart to create a tier list of competitors. Three tiers is a great number to start with. As your program matures and you gain more resources each year, you can start to enlarge the number of competitors on your list that get your attention.

Early on, though, it makes sense to focus only on that core set of competitors. The Tier Ones.

These won’t always be the ones most similar to you. A better bet is to judge them by revenue potential. Some competitors will sell very similar products but be so much larger that competing with them is a pie-in-the-sky idea. Instead, focus on the few that you could easily win many more deals from with a shot of focused CI attention in the right place.

Step three: Set up alerts to capture mentions

This isn’t a top-to-bottom guide on competitive intelligence, so this is where we turn our attention specifically to social media. However, you should be following the advice below across the rest of the internet too.

To start, you need data. Here’s some of the best data you can get from social media:

• The topics driving conversation for your competitors.
• Consumer sentiment about competitors and competitor developments.
• The specifics on what customers like and dislike about your competitors, their brands, and their products and services.
• The kinds of content they publish that perform well or poorly.

There’s plenty of the above you’ll be able to incorporate into your own strategies – to improve the success of your own content, for example. The rest is pure competitive intelligence, ready to be analyzed and used to inform your business decisions.

The best way to capture all this is to set up alerts for keywords, specific competitors, or both. Within social media itself, hashtags and @ mentions are perfect for zeroing in on the key talking points. To make this process entirely passive, you’ll need the help of third-party software.

Third-party social media monitoring tools (aka social listening software) will monitor multiple social platforms for mentions of competitors, hashtags, talking points, and more. The best will even report on the level of activity right now around each talking point.

This makes the process entirely passive, pushing alerts to you either in real-time or at defined intervals, so you can deal with updates at a set time each day or week.

Step four: Analyze your data

With data coming in, you can begin analyzing!

Since the point of all competitive analysis is to uncover actionable info that’ll drive business revenue, enable sales, and improve products, that’s what you should be filtering for as you go through your data.

Here are some questions to help you move from info to action:

• Where are my competitors having success? How can we replicate that success?
• How does the market feel about my competitors? Is sentiment positive or negative or mixed? What’s driving those opinions, and how can we use that information to improve opinions of our brand?
• Are there any imminent or existing big developments to be aware of? How might they change the market landscape? Are they opportunities or threats?

Farhan Manjiyani, Sr. Manager, Commercialization and Pricing at Grafana Labs, highlights the importance of user forums and events: 

“I’m in a space with 20+ competitors, so to stand out, each one tries to cut through the noise by regularly speaking at industry events or hosting their own marquee events throughout the year. [...] 

User forums (Reddit, Hacker News, X (FKA Twitter), etc.) will give you a good sense of user reactions to these announcements. What’s real and what’s hype will quickly become clear.”

Step five: Act on your findings

Your analysis should outline for you:

1. The ramifications of your findings for your business.
2. A plan of action in response.

Pivoting into action

With a solid understanding of the data and, by extension, the state of the market, it’s time to put your plan into action. When it comes to moving from analysis to action, a number of pivots can help.

If you’ve been using a SWOT analysis framework, you can pivot into a SOAR. This takes the Strengths and Opportunities from the SWOT, and adds ‘Aspirations’ and ‘Responses’. This means combining where you’re strong with the market’s opportunities, aligning those with your org’s aspirations (key goals), and using all that info to determine what to do with what you know.

The Four Major Elements of SWOT Analysis You Need to Know

SWOT is a framework for identifying and analyzing the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of any competitive entity. That goes for organizations, products, and individuals.

Competitive Intelligence AllianceAlex Walton

Of course, a SOAR inherently biases towards the positive. You’d also want to perform a kind of ‘SOWTAR’, that also looks at your weaknesses and the threats presented by competitors and market conditions. From there, you’d combine all you know with where your org wants to be in six months, 12 months, or three years, and decide how best to make those aspirations happen.

The ‘What, So What, Now What’ framework is great for orienting your analysis while you’re doing it, but also for presenting your findings to others in a way that’s super engaging.

So – that’s it! A quick five-step guide to using social media to fast-track your way to a competitive advantage.

Whether it’s enabling your sales team with details about weaknesses in a competitor’s feature set, or advising leadership on customer sentiment about your own products, social media can help you take action to improve the state of your business.

Social media’s advantages over other sources of intelligence

So we know social media is super effective as a platform to help you build your competitive advantage, but what are its advantages over other sources of intelligence?

Faster updates

Social media is all about broadcasting what’s happening right now.

Getting competitive updates through an RSS feed or by browsing to your competitor’s blog is all well and good, but it takes time to curate that content.

Most businesses today are spinning up dozens of social media posts a week across various social channels, talking about what they’ve got planned or in development right now. To keep up with the other fast movers, they have to. This makes social media a powerful source of up-to-the-minute information and real-time insights.

Competitor-driven content

When you ask the right questions, you can uncover vast depths of data about your competitors.

But if there are gaps in your questioning, you’ll miss out on crucial snippets of information.

That’s why it pays to gather intel from both angles:

1. Conduct your own research to dive deeper into questions specifically helpful to your business.
2. Set up ‘nets’ or monitoring services to capture and filter all the intel pushed out by your competitors and all the content published about them by third parties.

Social media is just one source of such ‘open’ intel, and these monitoring ‘nets’ are super powerful. Your findings can inform your research, creating a positive spiral of competitive insights and intel.

Viral possibility

On social media, news spreads quickly. Positive or negative.

Since it’s an open conversation, publicly visible to all, chatter around big market updates tends to grow exponentially. This gives you a rapid sense of market sentiment towards competitor developments without having to lift a finger.

Social media competitive intelligence tools

Alright, so you're convinced that social media is a goldmine for competitive intelligence. But how do you go about mining that gold without a pickaxe? That's where social media competitive intelligence tools come in. Let’s explore your options.

Dedicated social listening tools

Brandwatch: The crowd favorite

If you're looking for a dedicated social listening tool, Brandwatch is the reigning champ. According to our 2023 Tools of Choice Report, a whopping 40% of respondents who use such tools opt for Brandwatch. 

Why the love fest? Users can't stop raving about its “robust analytics and reporting, comprehensive features," and “expansive” capabilities. Oh, and did we mention the “great UI” and “ease of use”? 

Brandwatch claims to deliver everything you need to discover, attract, and engage customers on social media, helping you listen to your consumers and benchmark against your competitors. It's like having a social media whisperer at your fingertips.

Meltwater: The multimedia maestro

Meltwater is another social listening tool that's got its ears to the ground – and not just on traditional social media. This tool monitors data from a wide range of sources, including TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, podcasts, blogs, online news, and consumer review sites. 

It's like having a backstage pass to the entire internet. And if that wasn't enough, it also offers analytics on all those monitored conversations. Talk about a multimedia maestro!

Mention: The simple social sidekick

If you're after something a little more straightforward, Mention might be your new best friend. This tool is all about simplicity, with Slack integration and the ability to monitor over 1 billion sources across the web daily.

Hootsuite: The social media manager's dream

You might know Hootsuite as a social media management tool, but did you know it also offers activity monitoring? With Hootsuite, you can stay on top of conversations on key topics, track the performance of your posts and brand mentions, and monitor competitor activities. 

And here's a fun fact: Hootsuite's Insights are powered by none other than Brandwatch. What a dynamic duo of social media intelligence!

Inoreader: The customizable content aggregator

Imagine having a personal news feed that's tailored just for you. That’s just what you get with Inoreader, a customizable RSS reader that's praised for its user-friendliness and ability to aggregate various online content, including social media updates. 

Social listening within competitive intelligence platforms

Many competitive intelligence platforms include social listening as part of their package. Platforms like Klue and Crayon offer integrated social media monitoring features, providing a one-stop shop for all your competitive intelligence needs.

AI and large language models

While not exclusively for social media, tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google NotebookLM are great at quickly summarizing and analyzing large volumes of data, which could include social media content. As such, they’re super handy for identifying trends. 

So there you have it – a rundown of the tools of the trade for social media competitive intelligence. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just dipping your toes into the world of CI, these tools can help you stay ahead of the curve and keep an eye on the competition.

Summing up

Social media represents an excellent source of open, ethical competitive intelligence. It’s entirely free, and the largest platforms offer many of their own built-in methods of tracking conversation topics and competitor profiles.

On X, for example, it takes just seconds to set up X Pro (formerly known as Tweetdeck) for a feed of competitors’ posts and associated hashtags for talking points. Get email notifications or roundups for those talking points, and you’ve just set up an alert system.

For those with little time, small budgets, no experience, or a combination of all three, real-time social intelligence might just be the answer to all your competitive intelligence prayers.

Get Competitive Intelligence Certified

Do your team conversations about competitors swing between ignorance and panic? Usually, there’s no middle ground. It’s heads in the sand, or it’s falling skies.

If you struggle to respond confidently when asked about the competition, relying on scattered links and incomplete information, then worry no more.

Sign up to become Competitive Intelligence Certified and give your org the advantage. 👩‍🎓