How do you track what competitors post on social media?
Your competitors announce most of what they're doing on social media first. A new feature shows up in a LinkedIn post before the changelog. A shift toward a new customer group shows up as a run of posts and ads aimed at that group, weeks before the homepage changes. If you sell against these companies, those posts tell you what your sales team will hear about next and which messages you'll have to answer.
The usual way to keep up is manual. You follow each competitor's accounts, check their feeds every few days, and log what you see in a spreadsheet with columns for the date, platform, topic, format, and engagement. That works for two competitors on one platform. It falls apart at five competitors across LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and Instagram, because the checking takes hours and most of what you log is routine: a webinar reminder, a holiday post, a customer quote.
Social listening suites such as Sprout Social, Brandwatch, and Talkwalker automate the collection. They pull competitor posts into dashboards and measure share of voice, engagement, and sentiment across many accounts. They're built for social teams that want to benchmark performance. You still have to read the dashboard, decide which posts mean something, and work out what to do about them.
That last part is where an AI agent earns its place. Deciding whether a post matters takes the same judgment a marketer uses: knowing your positioning, remembering what the competitor said last month, and checking whether the post lines up with a pricing change or a new job opening. An agent can do that reading on a schedule and bring you only the conclusions.
Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Here's how it keeps track of your competitors on social media.
How Kite tracks your competitors' social media activity
Kite starts with what it already knows. When you sign up, it researches your company and your competitors, including where each competitor is active on social media, and records it all in your team's knowledge base. From there, Kite reads each competitor's recent posts and ads on the platforms they actually use and compares them with the last record it kept.
Kite doesn't report everything it reads. It holds each change up against the competitor's website, pricing, job posts, and ads, and asks whether it could affect your positioning, pricing, product plans, or content. The changes that pass that test come to you with the date, a link to the evidence, and a sentence on why they matter. You can run the check once or put it on a schedule, and when a change calls for a response, Kite proposes one and can write it.
- Choose which competitors and platforms to watch
- Read what each competitor posts, platform by platform
- Separate the moves that matter from routine posts
- Check in on a schedule and compare with last time
- Turn what you learn into your next move
Choose which competitors and platforms to watch
Tracking works best when it covers the competitors your buyers actually compare you with, on the platforms those competitors actually use. Kite builds that list from its research on your market. It looks at which companies appear in comparison pages, review threads, and "alternatives" articles next to yours, and at which companies target the same customers with the same kind of product.
For each competitor, Kite records which platforms it posts on and how active it is there. A B2B software company might publish nearly everything on LinkedIn and YouTube and barely use Instagram. A consumer brand might live on TikTok and Instagram. Kite reads the platforms where each competitor shows up, so you aren't paying attention to an account nobody updates.
You can change the list at any time. Name a competitor Kite missed, drop one that no longer matters, or ask Kite to watch a founder's personal LinkedIn profile as well as the company page. Founders at smaller companies often post the real news on their own profiles first.
Read what each competitor posts, platform by platform
Kite reads competitor activity through its own built-in data sources, so it doesn't need your social media logins to do this work. What it can read differs by platform:
- LinkedIn. Kite reads a competitor's company page and its recent posts, including the text, the date, the links in each post, and the number of reactions, comments, and shares. It can read the posts of founders and executives from their public profiles the same way.
- X. Kite searches public posts by account, keyword, hashtag, or mention. That covers what a competitor posts and what other people say to it or about it.
- YouTube. Kite reads any public video's title, description, view and like counts, comments, and full transcript. It also reads which videos rank for a search, so it can see whether a competitor is winning the searches your buyers run on YouTube.
- TikTok. Kite reads public TikTok content, which matters most for consumer and ecommerce brands.
- Instagram. Kite reads a public Instagram video or reel from its link, including the transcript and the post details.
- Paid social. Kite pulls the ads a competitor is running on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, plus Google, from the platforms' public ad libraries. For each ad, it collects the copy, the image or video, the landing page, and how long the ad has been running.
The ads deserve as much attention as the organic posts. A company tests its messages in organic posts, but it spends money on the ones it believes in. When the same claim appears in a competitor's LinkedIn posts and in a Meta ad that has been running for six weeks, you're looking at a message the competitor has committed to.
Separate the moves that matter from routine posts
Most competitor posts are routine, so Kite sorts what it reads into two groups. Routine activity, such as event reminders, holiday posts, and customer shout-outs, updates Kite's record of the competitor but stays out of your report. A change makes the report when it could alter your positioning, pricing, product plans, or content strategy.
Kite reports changes such as these:
- A new product, feature, or integration, especially one that matches something you sell.
- A new message or audience, such as a run of posts aimed at a customer group the competitor never mentioned before.
- A price or packaging change announced in a post.
- A significant campaign push aimed at your category or at your brand by name.
- Funding, an acquisition, a leadership hire, or a hiring push in one function.
Kite checks each one against the competitor's other public surfaces before it reports it. Say a scheduling software competitor posts three times in a week about clinics. On its own, that could be a coincidence. Then Kite finds new Facebook ads sending clinic owners to a fresh landing page and a job post for a healthcare sales lead. Now it's a confirmed move into a new market, and Kite reports it as one change, with links to the posts, the ads, and the job post, and a sentence explaining that the competitor is going after the clinic customers you already serve.
Check in on a schedule and compare with last time
Competitor tracking pays off when it runs on its own, so Kite can repeat the check on a schedule you choose, such as every Monday morning. Each run starts from Kite's record of where every competitor stood after the last check. The first run establishes that record, and every run after it reports only what changed since.
That record lives in your team's knowledge base, one page for each competitor, with the links behind every fact. It builds into a running history of each competitor's messaging, launches, and campaigns. Kite uses that history in its other work too, so a comparison page or a sales email it writes later reflects what the competitor is saying now rather than what it said at the last quarterly review.
If your team uses Slack, the results go to the channel you choose. Otherwise, Kite emails each report to the person who set up the schedule, and replying to the email continues the conversation. You can also keep the reports in the Kite web app, where each run appears as its own conversation. Between scheduled checks, Kite can keep a standing watch on a competitor's launch announcements and news, checking as often as once an hour and telling you when something new appears.
Turn what you learn into your next move
A competitor change is only useful if you do something with it, so Kite closes each report with suggested responses. Those suggestions draw on what Kite knows about your positioning and your customers, and they're specific to the change.
A competitor launching a feature you already have might call for a LinkedIn post showing how your version works and an update to your comparison page. A competitor moving into your core market might call for a landing page aimed at the customers it's targeting, or ad copy that answers its new claim directly. When a competitor's posts get unusually strong engagement on a topic, that tells you something about what your shared audience cares about, and Kite can propose your own take on it.
Kite writes the posts, pages, and ad copy you choose. It asks for your approval before it publishes anything on your website or your social accounts. Once you approve, it publishes through the accounts you've connected and sends you the links.
What you get
A competitor roster
The companies worth watching, why each one competes with you, and the social platforms each one is active on.
A record of each competitor's activity
One page per competitor in your team's knowledge base, kept current with each check and linked to the posts, ads, and pages behind every fact.
A report of material changes
For each change: which competitor, what changed, the date, a link to the evidence, and why it matters to you. When nothing material happened, the report says exactly that.
Suggested responses
The posts, page updates, and campaigns Kite recommends, which it can write and publish once you approve them.
A recurring check
The same sweep on the schedule you choose, delivered where your team already works.
How to get started
Start by telling Kite what you want to know. You might ask, "What have our competitors been posting on LinkedIn this month?" or "Check our top three competitors' social media every Monday and tell me if anything important changes."
Kite proposes the competitors and platforms it plans to watch, based on its research on your market, and shows you the list before the first check runs. Change it however you like. The first run gives you a current picture of each competitor and sets the starting point for every report after it.
Reading competitor activity uses Kite's built-in sources, so you don't need to connect anything to start. Connect your own LinkedIn, X, or other social accounts when you want Kite to publish its responses there. You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack.
Integrations used to track competitors' social media activity
Kite reads competitor activity on social media through its built-in research sources, with no separate account. The pages below explain how Kite works with the two platforms where that research goes deepest.
Read competitors' LinkedIn activity
Kite reads public LinkedIn company pages, employee profiles, and posts, including each post's text, date, links, and reactions, comments, and shares. That's how it follows what competitors and their founders announce on LinkedIn.
Common questions
Can Kite see what my competitors are posting on Instagram?
Partly. Kite reads the ads a competitor runs on Instagram and Facebook through Meta's public ad library, including the copy, the creative, the landing page, and how long each ad has run. It can also read any public Instagram reel or video from its link, including the transcript. Kite doesn't pull a competitor's full Instagram feed automatically the way it does for LinkedIn posts. For a brand that mainly markets on Instagram, the ads usually show what it is pushing hardest, and you can share links to the organic posts you want Kite to analyze.
Can ChatGPT analyze a competitor's social media accounts?
ChatGPT can analyze posts you paste into it, and it can summarize what a web search turns up about a competitor. It can repeat that search on a schedule with its tasks feature, but it doesn't keep a dedicated record of each competitor to compare new posts against. Kite reads posts through its own data sources, compares them with the record it kept from the last check, cross-checks them against the competitor's website and ads, and runs on a schedule.
How is Kite different from a social listening tool like Sprout Social or Brandwatch?
Social listening tools collect posts and mentions across many accounts and measure engagement, sentiment, and share of voice in dashboards. They suit social teams that report on those numbers every week. Kite reads less of the social web, and it decides which competitor changes matter, explains why, and writes the response. Some teams use both. For a comparison of the dedicated tools, see the best social media monitoring tools for tracking competitors Coming soon .
What should a competitor social media analysis include?
A useful analysis covers four things for each competitor: which platforms it uses and how often it posts, the topics and messages it keeps coming back to, which posts and formats get the most engagement, and what it is promoting with paid ads. The most valuable part is the comparison over time, because a change in topics or audience tells you more than any single post. Kite produces this analysis on its first run and then reports the changes on each check after that.
How often should I check my competitors' social media?
Weekly works for most teams. It's frequent enough to catch a launch or a new campaign while you can still respond, and spaced out enough that each report has something worth reading. A team in a fast-moving market, or one heading into its own launch, might check every few days and ask Kite for a standing watch on competitor launch announcements in between.