Competitive intelligence: How to find insights on social & beyond

Competitive intelligence is crucial for informed decision making, from your next social media post to creating your entire digital marketing strategy.

Using competitor analysis software to see what your competitors are doing isn’t about copying them. It’s about deeply understanding the market so you can set your organization apart to reach your audience in the most effective way.

Read on to learn how to use competitive intelligence insights to unlock business decisions that propel your business ahead of the pack.

What is competitive intelligence?

Competitive intelligence is collecting data and insights about your competitors, industry, market, and customers from multiple sources to create and inform your business policies and strategies.

4 types of competitive intelligence

While all information that you gather can be considered competitive business intelligence, it breaks down into four main categories.

1. Market intelligence

Market intelligence is data about factors outside your business, including:

• Demographics in your current regional market, or a new region you want to enter.
• Current industry trends.
• Current events and new technology.
• Market research about size, growth rate, and other benchmarks.

2. Product intelligence

Product intelligence tracks how your products compare to your competitors’ products in areas like:

• Features and performance.
• Price.
• Availability (e.g. online vs retail-only, shipping regions, etc).
• Reputation and reviews.

3. Competitor intelligence

Gathering information about your competitors can help you find new ways to differentiate yourself. Competitor intelligence includes:

• Understanding the key players in your industry and how their marketing efforts compare with yours.
• SWOT analysis of competitors (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats).
• Evaluating competitor strategies around visual branding and messaging, symbols, and positioning.

4. Consumer intelligence

Consumer intelligence provides insights about your customers or target audience, including:

• Demographics.
• How customers found you, why they purchased, and other journey mapping data.
• What your customers want in a product or service.
• Shopping behavior, including digital and in-person behavior, as well as other competitors they shop at.

The role of social media in collecting competitive intelligence

Business is happening on social media and not just on your own profiles. Your competitors are on social and so are their customers. Social listening uncovers valuable insights, like what your audience is saying about you (and your competitors).

Brands who use social listening are more confident in their ability to prove social media marketing ROI to key stakeholders—a huge competitive advantage.

Social listening takes your performance reports from “X number of likes, shares, comments” to “We identified that customers of Competitors A and B were unhappy with long customer service wait times, so our latest ad campaign centred our guaranteed 5 minute response time. That campaign drove 30% more traffic and 10% higher new signups this quarter!”

Use social listening to:

• Find out why people buy from your competitors (and get them to buy from YOU).
• Track your reputation.
• Identify the main emotions people feel about your brand, a competitor, or a topic with AI sentiment analysis.
• Search brand names or topics and scan over 150 million websites and 30 social media platforms in 187 languages.
• Capture market share with content your audience wants, made easy with data-driven reports.
• Prove your social ROI to your boss with detailed analytics and customizable reports.

This is how easy it is to use social listening to drive your competitive intelligence strategy:

How to find patterns in competitive intelligence research

Here are a few suggestions to turn your competitive insights into actionable business strategies.

Track mention volume by week

Pay attention to how many brand mentions you’re getting each week. While ebbs and flows are common, especially if your business is seasonal, big variations can point to something bigger going on.

Are mentions up 20% this week vs. last, and your brand sentiment metrics are mostly positive? It could point to a high profile kudos on a podcast that’s spurred conversation about your organization online. If so, great! Capitalize on the positivity with supporting social media content or an ad campaign.

What if that increased volume is negative? It could point to a mounting PR crisis. Identifying that early gives you time to get on top of it.

Notice engagement spikes

Is a piece of content going viral because the audience is so excited about it? Grateful for the cool tip or hack? Confused and asking clarifying questions? Understanding when and why something captures your audience’s attention gives you a blueprint for holding their attention too.

Marketing success is really as simple as giving people what they want, and competitive intelligence tells you what they want.

Likewise, if it’s your competitor getting all the buzz, did they launch something new? Does this change your plans or market positioning at all?

To know what counts as a spike in engagement, you need to know what your average engagement rate is. Or, when comparing your organization to others, the average engagement rate for your industry and the platform you’re measuring.

Our research found the overall average engagement rate of Instagram is 5% but only 2.3% on X.

Want a place to start? See all our current data on the average engagement rates by industry and platform.

Gather demographics

Knowing more about your customers and market share is always a good thing. Competitive intelligence software can track your audience’s key demographics, such as gender, age, language, location, interests, occupations, and more, over time.

Keep up with pricing trends

Does Competitor A always have a big quarterly sale? Has Competitor B just switched from a one-time purchase to a subscription model? Has Competitor C raised their prices?

And more importantly: How do all their customers feel about these changes and the pricing in your industry as a whole?

Maybe there are forum comments out there from users saying your product is so much more expensive than Competitor B. While that’s true, it could point to needing to educate your audience about what sets you apart in the competitive landscape. That insight translates directly into social media content and marketing campaigns your marketing team can start ASAP.

How competitive intelligence can shape your marketing strategy

Competitive intelligence impacts both your short-term and long-term marketing campaigns and business decisions.

Audience segmentation

Competitive intelligence tools give you the data you need to understand your audience. Beyond analytics performance reports and demographics, tools like Hootsuite Listening and SEMrush give you insight into what motivates your competitors’ audiences to engage with social media and other content.

How to use this data:

• While tools can help out, human eyes are all you need. Check competitor websites and social feeds quarterly and analyze the language they use to reach people.
• Differentiate yourself. For example, if they’re targeting small to medium sized companies, consider targeting enterprise organizations.

Identifying market gaps

Are people in your target market asking Reddit for product recommendations for something that doesn’t seem to exist? If others chime in that they wish it existed too, this could be your big competitive edge.

Source: r/photography on Reddit

How to use this data:

• If you’re seeing the same type of “wish list” from prospective customers time after time, it’s probably something that would sell. (Of course, do proper due diligence first.)
• Scan sources other than social media for well-rounded market intelligence. Consider competitive intelligence tools that also scan podcasts, websites, video mentions, and more.
• Remember: your sales teams are a treasure trove of information. Ask them what customers want, and track the reasons for lost sales.

Identifying competitor weaknesses

There are plenty of types of weaknesses you can use competitive intelligence software to uncover, such as:

• Gaps in content or ad strategies: Use tools like SEMrush to see if competitors are targeting the wrong keywords, or SpyFu to analyze their paid campaigns to uncover targeting opportunities.
• Customer feedback: Identify patterns in customer reviews, especially negative ones, to see which features customers wish their products had or customer service trends, like slow response times or quality control issues.
• Track social media performance: Use Hootsuite’s benchmarking features to track competitor audience growth and engagement over time. Regularly audit competitors to find ways to stand out. Are their posts infrequent or not resonating with their audience? Are they not on certain platforms? Identify what you can turn into a strength and differentiate yourself that way.
• Compete on SEO: Use Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush, and others to track your competitors’ SEO rankings and where you fall among them. Identify ways to beat them for relevant keywords, or uncover keywords they’re underutilizing. The same goes for social SEO such as post captions, hashtags, and more.

How to use this data:

• Once you’ve identified one or more key weaknesses, make a plan to improve your organization in those areas to become a stronger competitor.
• Regularly audit competitors and make strategic decisions about how that information should (or shouldn’t) change your marketing.

Risk management

Competitive intelligence tools help you keep tabs on potential risks, from finding new companies in your space to summarizing industry trends you need to know. Listening tools scan the web and social media to tell you everything from how competitors respond to events to discovering potential supply chain interruptions, new technology that could impact your business, and upcoming regulatory changes that could affect you legally.

An easy way to stay on top of potential PR risks is tracking your brand sentiment over time with Hootsuite Listening. Know with one glance if trouble could be brewing, or—much more excitingly—if a great review is going viral.

How to use this data:

• Stay ahead of your competition by responding early to trends.
• Use Hootsuite Listening to identify trends and measure your audience’s response to you with sentiment analysis tracking.

Product roadmapping

Listening to what customers are saying is like having an automatic product roadmap made for you. The most successful product is the one that gives customers what they want.

You can use feedback about your products to inspire new product features but often the most valuable insights come from the customers of your competitors. What do they love about their products that yours don’t have? What features do they wish existed? How can you make your products better, more innovative, more economical, or some other way of standing out?

For example, this customer loves their backpacks but doesn’t like how loud the zippers are, and others agreed in the comments. While a few comments shouldn’t be a reason to overhaul your entire product, it can be a springboard for conducting further research.

Source: r/ManyBaggers on Reddit

How to use this data:

• Identify feedback patterns on your own social media posts and sources around the web like Reddit, and feedback about your competitors.

Trendspotting

From the latest TikTok meme to market trends, spotting trends is much faster and easier with competitive intelligence tools.

You don’t need to jump on every trend but if it makes sense for your brand, it can inspire fresh marketing campaigns.

A classic example is organizations making their own versions of Spotify’s iconic Wrapped content. The best takes on this trend honor the ethos of Spotify’s look and voice while being relevant and funny to their own products/services, like how Beyond Type 1 used it to raise awareness of Type 1 diabetes:

See more

How to use this data:

• Use Hootsuite Listening to quickly search current trends on any topic, as well as monitor what people are saying about you over time.
• While social media trends are important, don’t forget about other important sources: include ad trends, pop culture trends, and marketing trends in your data.

Benchmarking

Others don’t necessarily define your success, but knowing where you stand among competitors can help with planning marketing goals. Some comparison is subjective, such as the perceived quality of social media posts, while other comparisons are factual.

How does your social media engagement rate compare? How is your SEO performance on primary keywords? How do you compare on attributes like product pricing or customer service response times?

You’ll likely need a combination of competitive intelligence tools to find these benchmarks. Use Hootsuite’s benchmarking and competitive analysis features to track your social media performance against competitors, and averages for your industry and organization size:

Add tools such as SEMrush or Ahrefs for SEO tracking, SimilarWeb for website traffic research, Crayon for breaking news, and others for a complete competitive intelligence solution from social media to product news and everything in between.

How to use this data:

• Make sure your marketing team knows which KPIs to track to work toward the objectives in your marketing strategy.

Competitive intelligence software for 2025

Hootsuite

All Hootsuite plans include competitive intelligence features, such as social listening, brand sentiment analysis, and Quick Search to discover trending hashtags, brands, and events globally or pinpointed anywhere in the world.

Combined with Hootsuite Analytics industry benchmarking and the ability to measure your social ROI of both organic and paid campaigns, you get a full 360 degree view of total social media performance—plus personalized tips to improve.

Add your competitors to Hootsuite Analytics for detailed comparisons at your fingertips, highlighting where you’re beating competitors and areas to improve:

Besides competitive intelligence, Hootsuite also:

• Saves you over 11 hours per month with smart automation and all the tools you need to succeed on social in one place.
• Allows you to easily create or repurpose content in a few clicks with OwlyWriter AI.
• Includes a universal inbox to reply to comments and private messages across platforms right inside your Hootsuite dashboard, plus team routing and auto-responses.
• Automatically schedules content when your audience is most likely to see it with your personalized best time to post.
• Enhances growth with unique employee advocacy tools to enhance your organic reach.

Use Hootsuite for:

• Social media competitive intelligence and all-in-one management of multiple platforms.
• Content ideas, trend discovery, and drafting social posts with AI.
• Improving response times with auto-replies and a unified team inbox.

Talkwalker

Talkwalker, recently acquired by Hootsuite, is the best digital competitive intelligence software for all organizations. Talkwalker scans over 150 million websites and 30 social platforms in 192 languages, plus identifies your brand in videos and photos.

Talkwalker powers the social listening capabilities built into Hootsuite, and also includes real-time monitoring of sources off social media, such as podcasts, broadcast media, news, blogs, forums, and more.

With this much coverage, plus innovative features like virality maps, topic clusters, real-time alerts, performance scoring, and BlueSilk AI to summarize current insights and predict future trends.

Use Talkwalker for:

• Advanced competitive intelligence across millions of sources, including social media, websites, videos, podcasts, and more.
• Real-time notification of potential PR crises, plus the ability to predict the likelihood of future events.

SEMrush

Keep tabs on your competitors’ SEO and ad campaign performance while also optimizing your own content and measuring your SERP performance over time. SEMrush has all the SEO tools you need, from organic and PPC keyword research to competitive intelligence insights, including link building, local SEO, rank tracking, and more.

Source: SEMrush

Use SEMrush for:

• Planning your SEO strategy with keyword research, including finding out which keywords your competitors are using.
• Tracking your SEO and ad campaign performance over time, including suggestions to improve.
• AI tools to optimize your content.

Get the data you need to compete and the publishing, engagement, and listening tools you need to succeed on social media with Hootsuite. Save 130+ hours per year by making social media management easy. Try it free today.