Free Social Media Competitor Analysis Worksheet

The 5 brands you instinctively name first are the WRONG list. Their audience is too similar to yours; you'll just imitate. Instead pick 2 direct competitors (same product, same audience), 2 adjacent brands (same audience, different product — they've already won the attention you want), and 1 wildcard from a totally different category whose tone or format you envy. The adjacent brands are where the real ideas come from.

Open each competitor's feed and count posts in the last 14 days, by platform. Volume tells you how seriously they take social — but the more useful number is the gap distribution. A brand posting 3x a week consistently beats one that posts 12x then goes silent for 10 days. Note both numbers; the consistent ones are the ones with a real workflow you should reverse-engineer.

A single viral post tells you nothing — viral is mostly luck. The top 5 posts in a 90-day window tell you the structural pattern. Sort each platform's feed by engagement and write down the first line (the hook), the format (carousel / video / single image / text-only), and the topic of each top-5 post. The pattern jumps out fast — usually 3 of 5 share a single hook structure and 4 of 5 share a single format.

The bottom-5 audit is more important than the top-5 because it's where you learn what your competitor (and the platform algorithm) actively dislikes. Sort by lowest engagement; write down the same fields. Often the bottom-5 share an obvious failure mode: corporate-speak, no hook, link-in-bio without reason, off-topic posts, or low-effort imagery. That failure mode is a list of things you can stop doing immediately.

Look at the timestamps of the top posts. Most platforms show the time the post went up; if you check engagement at hour 1, hour 6, and 24 hours later, you can see whether the post built slowly (long-tail content — usually carousels and explainers) or peaked early and died (entertainment / trending content). This tells you which engagement curve your competitor is optimised for — and whether you should imitate or differentiate.

Read the last sentence of every top-5 post. Most "study competitor copy" advice tells you to imitate the hook; the bigger leverage is the CTA. Note the CTA type (save / comment / DM / click / book) and the framework (PAS, AIDA, BAB, FAB, PASTOR — see the CTA Generator tool). If 4 of 5 top posts ask for a save, the audience is treating that account as a reference. If 4 of 5 ask for a comment, it's being treated as a conversation. Match your account's positioning to the CTA pattern that's working.

After all of the above, the temptation is to keep gathering more data. Don't. Open a Google Doc, write a one-pager: 3 things to start doing this week, 2 things to stop doing this week, and 1 experiment to run for 30 days. That's the whole audit. Anything longer goes in the drawer; anything shorter doesn't get acted on. Re-run the entire audit every 90 days; the cadence is what makes it valuable.