Competitive Benchmarking: How to Spy On Competitor's Data

I used to think competitive benchmarking for social media was just another corporate buzzword—until I actually used it. Turns out, studying our competitors’ social media moves helped us spot gaps and refine our strategy to boost engagement.

Now, leveraging competitive intelligence isn’t copying. It’s about learning what works, what doesn’t, and where you can do better. Ahead, you'll learn how to analyze competitors the right way—plus, get a template to make it easy.

Key takeaways

• For effective competitive benchmarking it's essential to understand the layer of analysis it implies-the KPIs and focus.

• Competitive benchmarking is only as good as the data behind it. Relying on outdated or incomplete information leads to misleading conclusions.

• Competitive advantages are hidden in the gaps. Instead of just copying what competitors are doing well, look for where they’re failing.

What is competitive benchmarking?

Competitive benchmarking is the process of analyzing competitors’ strategies, performance, and positioning to identify industry standards and identify improvement opportunities. It lets you measure success against key rivals and accordingly refine your marketing strategies, gaining a competitive edge.

How can competitive benchmarking help businesses?

• Spot opportunities and weaknesses faster: Studying competitors’ strategies helps you see what’s working and compare your stance. Maybe a rival is outperforming you in customer engagement or pricing strategy—benchmarking highlights these gaps so you can refine your approach.

• Make smarter decisions with real data: Instead of guessing what works, a competitive benchmarking analysis gives you clear, data-backed insights. Mitsubishi Electric, for example, used Socialinsider’s social media analytics to evaluate its social media campaigns. They uncovered patterns that shaped both creative direction and budget allocation, leading to better marketing decisions.

• Get inspired and stay relevant: Looking at competitors' social media content should be about learning. What topics spark engagement? Where are they falling short? Benchmarking helps refine your content strategy, ensuring your brand stays fresh and ahead of trends.

• Plan growth with realistic targets: Tracking industry performance benchmarks and competitors' growth rates makes forecasting more accurate. Instead of setting arbitrary goals, you can craft strategies based on where the market is heading, keeping your business on a sustainable growth path.

Distinctions between competitive benchmarking and other analysis methods

In social media marketing, we hear a lot of the terms competitive benchmarking, competitive analysis, and market research, usually used as synonyms.  However, each process has its nuances, which shape your tasks differently when creating one.

Let's see the main differences between them.

Competitive benchmarking vs competitive analysis

Competitive benchmarking vs market research

Step-by-step guide on how to do competitive benchmarking for social media

Competitive benchmarking needs a structured approach. Without one, you’ll find yourself overwhelmed with data—and then some.

Here’s how to go about this:

Competitive benchmarking needs a structured approach. Without one, you’ll find yourself overwhelmed with data—and then some.

Here’s how to go about this:

Step 1: Get clear on your goals and objectives

To start, define what success looks like. Do you want to boost Instagram engagement or improve brand sentiment on Twitter? Maybe you want to outshine a competitor on LinkedIn?

Setting specific goals ensures your benchmarking actually leads to action.

Also, instead of vague aspirations like “We want better engagement,” go for something measurable: “Increase Instagram engagement by 15% in three months.” The clearer your objectives, the more useful your analysis will be.

Step 2: Identify your key competitors

Now that you know your goals, it’s time to figure out against whom you measure yourself. You’ll also get a broader perspective on what’s working—and what gaps you can fill.

• Direct competitors: They sell what you sell to the same people. Their performance is your clearest benchmark.
• Indirect competitors: They target your audience but offer something different. Their content strategies might spark ideas you hadn’t considered.
• Industry leaders vs. similar-sized brands: Big brands set high standards, but businesses at your level offer more realistic comparisons.
• Unexpected inspiration: The best social media strategists consider tactics outside the target industry.

Step 3: Select the right KPIs and metrics for competitive benchmarking

Remember, your goal isn’t just tracking numbers but uncovering actionable insights that give your brand an edge.

I recommend prioritizing the following categories of social media metrics:

Brand awareness and growth

• Follower growth rate: Are you gaining traction or just treading water? If your competitors are growing faster, their acquisition strategy is stronger.

• Reach and impressions: A competitor might have fewer followers but far greater reach, meaning their content gets better distribution or algorithmic boosts. Identifying why can help refine your strategy.

Engagement

• Engagement rate (per platform): Are your competitors getting higher engagement rates on specific channels? What are their strategy's strengths? Learning about the way they approach social media marketing will help you identify best practices when it comes to creating content for different platforms.

• Engagement rate by industry and country: Socialinsider provides industry and regional engagement benchmarks, to be able to better understand the context of your brand.

How to find this data?

Easy! Use Socialinsider’s social media competitor benchmarking tool to compare engagement rates by industry or location. To get started, you just have to follow these simple steps:

• Log in to Socialinsider and add the profiles you're interested in examining.
•  Go to the Industry section (ps: at the moment it's available only for Facebook and Instagram)
• Then select the brand you want to compare against the industry and filter out categories of interest, like industry, and the page's number of followers.

• Shares and comments (by platform): More shares mean content is valuable enough to spread…

…more comments signal meaningful conversations. Analyze what drives these responses for your competitors.

• Video views: Video content rules most platforms. If competitors’ video views are significantly higher, they’re either investing in better video content or leveraging algorithm advantages—you need to find out which and adapt.

Content performance and strategy

• Post formats performance: What types of posts (carousels, single images, or Reels) work best for competitors? For instance, platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn heavily favor carousels—if competitors are outperforming you here, you might need to adjust your content mix.

• Engagement by content pillars (per channel and cross-channel): Instead of blindly copying competitors, look at which topics or themes perform best. Are they winning because of educational posts, thought leadership, or brand storytelling?

And ask yourself questions like, for specific platforms, are they leveraging specific topics? This type of analysis will give you more helpful insights if applies both at a micro and macro level.

• Top-performing content comparison (by platform): Identify competitors’ best practices and posts per platform and reverse-engineer why they worked. Consider factors like time of day, caption style, and use of interactive elements (polls, stickers, CTAs).

• Posts published per month (by platform): Are competitors posting more frequently than you? If they are publishing more but still getting engagement, they’ve likely nailed content cadence—test against it.

Step 4: Collect data efficiently (methods and tools)

The quality of your competitive benchmarking hinges on accuracy. So, rather than relying on guesswork, use the right tools and methods to collect meaningful social media insights. This includes:

Industry reports and benchmarking studies

Industry-wide competitive benchmarks reports provide a macro-level view of performance trends across different platforms and industries. Instead of comparing yourself in isolation, you can see whether a dip in engagement is a brand-specific issue or an industry-wide trend.

For example, Socialinsider’s annual social media engagement benchmarks analyze engagement rates across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. These reports break down performance by industry, platform, and content type, helping you spot where you stand in the bigger picture.

Suppose your Instagram engagement is declining, but industry benchmarks show a similar drop. You’ll know it’s a broader trend—possibly driven by algorithm changes—rather than a flaw in your social media content strategy.

Social media analytics

If you need competitor-level insights, social media analytics tools can be quite handy. Socialinsider is built for head-to-head comparisons, for instance. It cuts through the noise and delivers real performance data, showing exactly how competitors stack up in areas like engagement, reach, and posting frequency.

Key capabilities:

• Compare engagement metrics across competitors.
• Access industry benchmarks to gauge where you stand.
• Analyze top-performing content strategies.

Rather than blindly experimenting, you can use these insights to double down on what’s working in your space—whether that means refining content formats or adjusting post frequency.

Social listening

Numbers tell one side of the story, but what about public sentiment? You can use social listening tools like Brand24 to:

• Monitor competitor sentiment: Are people raving about a rival’s product or frustrated with their service?
• Spot industry trends: Track viral discussions and emerging topics.
• Find competitive gaps: Identify customer complaints competitors aren’t addressing—then position yourself as the solution.

Instead of just tracking likes and shares, you get real context behind the numbers, which is crucial for understanding how competitors are perceived.

Marketing intelligence

Competitive benchmarking isn’t just about social media. If you want to analyze web traffic, audience demographics, and digital strategies, SimilarWeb delivers deep insights into competitors’ efforts.

What you can uncover:

• Where their traffic is coming from (organic search, paid ads, social, referrals).
• Which platforms drive the most engagement.
• Audience demographics and market overlap.

Step 5: Analyze & interpret benchmarking data

Once you’ve gathered your competitive benchmarking data, the real work begins—turning raw numbers into insights and tactics that drive an effective social media strategy.

First, compare your metrics against direct and indirect competitors’ numbers. If your engagement rate is lower than industry benchmarks, or if a competitor’s follower growth is consistently higher, you need to dig deeper:

• Are they posting more frequently?
• Is the competitor’s strategy analysis showing stronger, community-driven content?
• Are they leveraging influencer collaborations or other engagement tactics you’re missing?

Note that the goal isn’t just to match their numbers. Instead, you want to understand why they’re ahead and how you can close the gap.

Moreover, analyzing competitors’ strategies and engagement trends over time helps uncover what’s working in their strategy.

Study this screenshot from Socialinsider, which presents the top-performing content pillars on TikTok for Netflix, Hulu, and Showtime:

• All three entertainment brands focus on memes, GIFs, and viral moments, showing that short, humor-driven content works best on TikTok.
• Hulu gets higher engagement (0.707%) from event coverage and live updates than Netflix (0.356%). This suggests real-time content boosts audience interaction.
• Showtime posts less often but has the highest engagement (2.523%–3.099%), proving that quality beats quantity.

Step 6: Apply insights for business growth

At this point, you’d have gathered tons of useful info. Use each competitive insight to make smarter business moves. You can:

• Sharpen your content strategy: If your social media analysis shows that competitors thrive on real-time updates or viral moments, test those formats in your own strategy. If their success comes from high-quality, low-volume posts (rather than a flood of mediocre content), consider dialing back and focusing on impact over output.

• Optimize your ad spend: Benchmarking can reveal where competitors are spending and whether their approach is working.  Are they dominating paid reach on a specific platform? That might be a sign to shift the budget there. Are they getting high engagement but weak conversions? That could mean they prioritize awareness over performance—a gap you can exploit with conversion-focused ads.
  

• Improve customer experience: Spot the gaps competitors are leaving behind and use them to your advantage. If their customers are frustrated with slow response times, speed up yours. If their content gets attention but lacks depth, position your brand as the go-to resource for real insights.

Challenges when doing competitive benchmarking

Competitive benchmarking is powerful, but it’s not without its limitations and blind spots. Be prepared for certain social media marketing challenges.

API restrictions

These can block access to key competitor data. For example, social media platforms don’t allow retroactive tracking of follower growth—if you didn’t record a competitor’s follower count at a certain time, there’s no way to retrieve past data.

This means benchmarking can’t always provide historical comparisons unless you’ve been consistently tracking competitors over time.

Non-public competitor metrics

Metrics such as reach and impressions, create another challenge. Unlike engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares), reach is only visible to account owners, making direct comparisons impossible.

Instead, benchmarking tools use estimation models based on public data, factoring in audience size, engagement, and posting frequency. While these estimates can highlight relative performance trends, they aren’t precise figures, meaning you should treat them as directional insights rather than absolute truths.

To navigate these competitors’ research challenges, the key is understanding what benchmarking can and can’t tell you. Use it to spot trends, content strategies, positioning opportunities—whatever you need—but always layer in first-party data (your own reach, ad performance, and audience insights).

Common mistakes to avoid in competitive benchmarking

Relying on outdated or inaccurate data

If your data is stale, your insights are useless. Harsh, but true. Competitive benchmarking only works if you’re working with fresh, accurate numbers.

Trends shift, algorithms change, and audience behaviors evolve.

If you’re pulling benchmarks from last year, you're missing critical updates that could impact your strategy.

Use real-time tracking tools instead of relying on one-off reports that quickly become obsolete.

Measuring metrics without establishing goals

Tracking competitor data without a clear purpose is a waste of time. Are you benchmarking to improve engagement? Outperform on reach? Optimize social media?

Without defined goals, you risk collecting a random assortment of numbers that provide no real direction. Define what matters most to your growth strategy, and focus on only those metrics that give you actionable insights.

Not having a continuous benchmarking process

Markets shift fast—your competitors aren’t standing still, and neither should you. A one-time benchmarking report won’t help you stay ahead.

The smartest brands are always researching competitors, spotting patterns over time rather than reacting to isolated performance spikes.

Treat analyzing competitors’ marketing strategies as an ongoing process, not a static report you check once and forget.

Final thoughts

Benchmarking for competitive advantage is largely about using data to refine your strategy to see better results.

Think: better content, optimized ad spend, improved customer experience—anything that can help set your brand apart.

The key is to benchmark consistently, focus on the right metrics, and turn insights into action.

Socialinsider makes this process easier by providing head-to-head competitor comparisons, industry benchmarks, real-time performance tracking, you name it.

Use it to monitor key metrics such as engagement, reach, impressions, and follower growth across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok. Its user-friendly interface and responsive customer support make the tool accessible for businesses of all sizes, too.