How to Perform a Competitive Audit with Agorapulse

Do you get the sense that competitors outperform your brand on social media? Wondering what they’re doing that your team isn’t? How about what they aren’t doing that you could start today?

Conduct a competitive audit to stay ahead of the curve and get more value from your social media strategy. By analyzing the competition, you can see what other brands in your space do well on social media and identify areas where your brand can improve.

This article covers how to perform a competitive audit with Agorapulse. By the end, you’ll know how to compare your performance to the competition and how to monitor brands on social media—so you can develop a strategic edge in your category. (And try Agorapulse for free today!)

What Is a Competitive Audit?

A competitive audit is the process of researching your brand’s competitors. It’s an element of market research that reveals how the competition is performing, what they’re doing well, and where they’re failing.

This analysis also clues you into opportunities where your brand can outperform the competition. In other words, it helps your brand gain a competitive edge.

A comprehensive competitive analysis looks at everything from the brand’s product offerings and positioning to its marketing strategies and customer feedback.

Here, we’ll focus on gathering competitive intelligence through the lens of social media. We’ll walk through workflows to use and tools that make analyzing your competitors easier.

What Can You Accomplish with a Competitive Audit?

Is a competitive audit worth your team’s time and resources? In many cases, absolutely. Let’s look at a few outcomes you can achieve with this analysis.

Benchmark social media performance

Are your top competitors really outperforming your brand on social media? Or do you have that impression after seeing only their most viral posts?

By auditing their social performance, you can understand the outcomes they’re actually achieving. Then, you can use their audience and engagement metrics as a benchmark.

It’s important to note that many factors may prevent your brand from replicating the competition’s results. For example, your brand may be starting with a much smaller audience.

As a result, it’s rarely a good idea to try to achieve the same results. Instead, consider this data as added context for understanding your brand’s social media performance.

Identify gaps and opportunities

Which topics or formats do your competitors completely ignore? Could they be good opportunities for your brand?

Eva Tranova, Agorapulse’s Social Media Manager, uses our competitor benchmarking tool to analyze other brands in the social media management software space and spot opportunities for Agorapulse on Instagram.

As Eva puts it, “Sprout Social relies heavily on carousel posts, while Hootsuite focuses more on Instagram reels. This insight helped me see where Agorapulse could stand out with a balanced mix of educational carousel posts and Reels.”

She elaborates, “The data gives a high-level overview of competitors’ activities, and it’s useful to dig deeper into their top-performing posts to understand what worked for them and explore strategies we could adapt.”

Research customer preferences

When you analyze competitors’ social media metrics, you’ll learn much more than what the brand has achieved. You’ll also gain insight into what customers and followers like and dislike.

Those competitor posts with record-breaking numbers of likes and comments? They cover opinions or topics customers like and use formats or styles followers appreciate.

These insights can fuel your brand’s social strategy, too. If you share similar buyer personas, you can easily translate this data, adapting your approach to fit customer preferences better.

Get ideas for new products or services

A competitor audit can go beyond customer preferences and reveal customer wants and needs. For example, your audit might turn up comments like “I wish you had this color” or “Make this product next!”

Why not give customers what they want? These comments and reviews may spark ideas for your brand to develop new products and services.

It’s important to note that the goal of a competitive audit isn’t spying on other brands so you can copy their ideas. While using this data to brainstorm ideas, remember to focus on differentiation, not replication.

Fine-tune positioning and messaging

How do your competitors position their brand, products, and services? How does their messaging sound, and what makes it unique?

These insights help you rethink how to differentiate your brand. They can also help you refine how you position your brand and share messaging on social media.

Avoid being blindsided by the competition

It’s easy to stay in your lane and build your brand based on your values and mission. But if you don’t keep an eye on the competition, their next product launch or complete rebrand might (unpleasantly) surprise you.

One of the biggest perks of regularly performing competitive audits is staying on top of the moves other brands in your space are making. This way, you can be ready to respond and avoid being caught off guard.

How to Conduct a Competitive Audit with Agorapulse

With Agorapulse, you can collect competitor data in just a few minutes.

Let’s walk through the steps.

Create a list of top competitors

First, you need a list of competitors. If you don’t have one or if your list could use an update, you have a few options to find direct competitors:

• Ask your sales team: Find out which brands customers mention most often during sales calls. Which companies does your brand lose sales to the most?
• Use social listening: Pay attention to the other brands that appear in your social listening searches. Which brands do customers recommend alongside or instead of yours?

In many cases, you’ll have just a few direct competitors who sell the same products or services as your business. To expand your list and gather more data, research the indirect competitors in your digital space.

Here’s how:

• Do keyword research: Which brands appear in Google searches for topics relevant to your products and services? Use keyword research to find your biggest organic competitors.
• Review advertising data: Which brands use ads to target the keywords your products and services rank for? Analyze advertising data to find your biggest paid competitors.

Benchmark competitors’ social performance

Once you have a list of top brands in your space, plug it into Agorapulse’s Competitors benchmark tool. This tool supports unlimited Facebook and Instagram profiles, so you can easily add your top five or top 10.

Are you tempted to add dozens of profiles? Nothing is stopping you from going overboard, but that isn’t as helpful as you might think. The more competitors you add, the more noise you’ll have to filter out as you look for signal.

Check their posting frequency and audience growth

Now you’re ready to start reviewing competitors’ social data. Start by checking their posting frequency.

How often do they post on the social platform? Are they even publishing at all? To review the number of posts per week, month, or any other time frame, change the dates for the analysis.

The example above covers a 28-day period. Most competitors post every weekday, but there are a few outliers. Unbounce only posted about once a week during the period, while Leadpages posted multiple times per day.

How quickly are your competitors gaining followers? Is it more of a steady increase, or are there spikes from specific initiatives? Have they had periods of losing followers? Our audience comparison can answer these questions.

Review their engagement metrics

Next, explore the brands’ engagement metrics. How much engagement do they generate altogether? What’s their engagement rate per post? How do these metrics compare to each brand’s audience size?

In the example above, it’s easy to see that HubSpot has the highest engagement rate by far, with over 420 likes and comments per Instagram post. HubSpot also has the largest audience on the list, so this result isn’t surprising.

However, Leadpages has the lowest engagement rate by far despite having the highest number of posts and the third-largest audience on the list.

A quick look at their content format breakdown reveals that Leadpages prioritizes photos. In contrast, brands like ClickFunnels focus on reels, which generate significant engagement.

Upon analyzing Agorapulse’s engagement per post type chart, it’s easy to see that HubSpot generates relatively high engagement across content formats despite publishing more reels than any other format. This data suggests that HubSpot’s photos and carousels perform better than the brand’s reels.

While all competitors attract far more likes than comments, ClickFunnels’ content has the most comments overall. It would be worth reviewing the brand’s content manually to learn more about the topics and angles it covers.

Analyze their top content

Agorapulse automatically identifies the top content from your competitors. You can sort by total engagement, comments, or likes to focus on the metrics your team cares about most.

In the example above, ClickFunnels has the most engaging post overall, despite not having the largest audience. It would be worth clicking to view each top-performing post on Instagram to better understand why they work.

Monitor competitors on social media

While Agorapulse’s Competitors benchmark tool gives you insight into other brands’ performance, our social media listening tool gives you a closer look at what people say about your competitors.

Set up a social listening search

First, add your competitors’ brand names and hashtags to a social listening search. Create separate searches to manage each competitor individually or add them all to a single search to analyze them as a group.

Check search volume and engagement trends

How often do your competitors appear in social listening searches? The volume chart tracks the total number of posts, the average per day, and the number of different people talking about the brand.

How are people reacting to content that mentions your competitors? The engagement chart breaks down how many reactions, comments, and shared posts about your competitors have generated.

Both of these charts help identify activity outside of normal patterns. For example, if you spot a spike in search volume, it would be worth scrolling through the listening feed to analyze the nature of the conversation.

Monitor customer sentiment

Next, check the sentiment surrounding these conversations. Do they discuss your competitors in a positive light, or are they dominated by frustrated customers?

Agorapulse automatically detects whether each post has a positive, neutral, or negative sentiment. Our social listening tool also provides comparative data so you can see how sentiment evolves through time.

For more insight into positive or negative posts, scroll through the social listening feed. Look for patterns to gain more insight into the feelings behind the content and the reason for the sentiment.

Perform a SWOT analysis

Go deeper with a SWOT analysis. Use your insights to dive into competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and find threats and opportunities.

Spot strengths

First, get clear on what the competition is doing well. Are some competitors growing quickly, generating incredible engagement, or maintaining a strongly positive sentiment?

Review top-performing content to learn why it’s performing so well. Use objective criteria to make a list of what’s working.

Identify weaknesses

Next, look for areas where the competition needs improvement. Are some competitors losing ground over time due to a decrease in followers, negative sentiment, or a lack of engagement?

Take a closer look at competitor content to understand why it isn’t working. Look at customer content to learn why any negative conversations exist.

Pinpoint threats

Are some competitors gaining ground on your brand by attracting new followers quickly or publishing highly engaging content? Pay attention to what these brands are doing well, especially if they’re growing quickly.

List opportunities

Then, identify things your competitors aren’t doing that your brand can do better. Are some competitors completely ignoring carousels? Do some competitors generate very few customer conversations?

Turn your insights into a plan

Finally, compile your notes and incorporate them into your social media strategy. Start by setting goals for each social profile, using your competitors as a benchmark.

In the near term (30 days), start with some quick wins or easy experiments. For example, test out content formats that are working well for competitors.

In the medium term (60 days), focus on making bigger changes. For example, test new content series or pursue partnerships with social media influencers.

In the long term (90 days), monitor your results and compare your progress to the competition. Keep using competitive intelligence to refine your strategy.

Common Challenges in Conducting Competitive Audits

Get more out of every competitive analysis by working around these common issues.

Difficulty accessing competitor data

Competitor data can be tricky to collect and process if you attempt to do it manually. For example, you can certainly check competitors’ social media performance and search for posts mentioning their brands.

However, taking a manual approach is incredibly time-consuming. Instead, use solutions like Agorapulse, which can gather and display the data for you. You’ll save tons of time that you can use for analysis and strategy.

Subjective analyses

When you analyze competitors, it’s easy to let your subjectivity take over. For example, you might view the competition’s tactics as ugly, abrasive, annoying, or silly.

To get more value from your analysis, set these subjective views aside. Instead, focus on objective criteria. Focus on the format, style, content, and messaging of the competition’s social media content to understand what appeals to their audience.

Outdated information

The competitive landscape can change quickly. One brand might outperform all of your competitors one month, and another might take the top spot the next month. Plus, new competitors can emerge when you aren’t looking.

To stay ahead of the curve, use tools like Agorapulse that analyze the competition automatically. Review the insights regularly (e.g., weekly) to spot patterns and respond to trends on time.

Over-indexing on the competition

Once you incorporate competitive analysis into your workflow, you might find that your team focuses too much on the competition and not enough on celebrating what makes your brand unique.

Keep in mind that a competitive audit should be just one element of your approach. As you refine your social media strategy, take care to factor in your own audience research, your brand’s values, and your business goals.

Wrapping Up How to Conduct a Competitor Audit

For B2C and B2B brands alike, competitive data is essential for establishing and maintaining a strategic edge. With Agorapulse’s benchmark report and social listening tool, you can easily monitor your competitors’ social media performance and analyze their mentions.

Curious how a competitive audit could transform your brand’s social media strategy? Sign up for a free trial of Agorapulse and start gathering competitive intelligence today.