How to Do a Competitor Analysis (Step-By-Step)

A competitor analysis isn't about copying someone else, it's about not wasting time guessing what works when someone in your exact space has already shown you, publicly, for free. Every post they make, every price they list, every comment they get is real evidence sitting in plain sight.

Step 1: Pick 3 real competitors

Choose three accounts or businesses actually competing for the same audience as you, not the biggest name in the industry worldwide, but people realistically fighting for the same customer you want. A mix helps: one doing noticeably well, one about your size, and one just starting out.

Step 2: Study their content

1. Open each competitor's profile and sort or scroll to find their best-performing posts. The ones with the most likes, comments, saves, or shares relative to their other posts.
2. Note the format (video, carousel, single image), the topic, and the style of the caption for each of their top 3-5 posts.
3. Look for a pattern across all three competitors. If the same type of content keeps winning across different accounts, that's a real signal about what your shared audience wants, not a coincidence.

Step 3: Study their offer and positioning

1. Visit each competitor's website or bio link.
2. Write down exactly what they're selling, how they describe it, and their pricing if it's listed.
3. Note what they emphasize first. Is it price, speed, quality, results? That's their positioning, and it tells you what they believe matters most to the customer.

Step 4: Study their keywords and hashtags

Using the same method from the keyword and hashtag lesson, check what terms show up on their top-performing posts and pages. If you see the same hashtag or phrase repeated across a competitor's best content, that's confirmation it's genuinely working for their audience, not a random choice.

Step 5: Study their comments

This step gets skipped constantly and it's the most valuable one.

1. Open the comments on a competitor's most popular posts.
2. Read what people are actually asking, praising, or complaining about.
3. A repeated question in the comments is a content idea you can answer better. A repeated complaint is a gap you can fill that they haven't.

Step 6: Put it together

Create one simple document or note with a row for each competitor and columns for: best content type, positioning, top keywords/hashtags, and the biggest gap you noticed in their comments. Seeing it side by side makes the pattern obvious in a way that scrolling through profiles separately never does.

Common mistakes

• Copying a competitor's exact content instead of noticing the pattern behind why it worked.
• Only looking at competitors who are already huge, instead of ones actually your size or slightly ahead.
• Skipping the comments section, which is often more useful than the post itself.
• Doing this once and never repeating it. A competitor's strategy shifts, and so should your check-ins.
• Analyzing five competitors so shallowly that no real pattern emerges, instead of three studied properly.

Your first step

• Pick your 3 real competitors.
• Find and note their top 3-5 performing posts each.
• Write down their offer, pricing, and positioning.
• Check their top keywords and hashtags.
• Read their comments and note one repeated question and one repeated complaint per competitor.

Continue learning

• How to Read Your Instagram/TikTok Analytics Like a Marketer