Competitor social listening: what customers say

Short answer

To learn what customers say about competitors, track the names of three to five main competitors (with spelling variants) and keep one sheet per competitor: what they are praised for, what they are criticised for, why people switch to them and why they leave, and on which topics you are compared with them. The sheet helps sales prepare for comparison questions and helps product see what the market expects. All of it is done from public sources only and within an ethical line.

Why what is said about competitors matters

What is written about your own brand shows your customers' experience. What is written about competitors shows the rest of the market: what buyers who never came to you value, where the competitor is strong and where it loses customers. A competitor's customers often write openly: "the service is good, but delivery is late", "it's cheap, but there's no warranty". These sentences show you both the opportunity and the standard — the minimum customers already expect.

Which competitors to track

• Direct competitors — selling the same product to the same audience; two or three of them.
• Alternative solutions — solving the same problem a different way: online videos instead of a course, a marketplace instead of a shop.
• New entrants — those who entered the market in the last year; posts about them grow quickly.
• For each competitor, a variant list as careful as your own brand's: Latin, Cyrillic, abbreviations, misspellings.

The competitor sheet

1. 1Praised forThe three to five most frequent praise topics, with the number of different authors.
2. 2Criticised forThe three to five most frequent complaint topics.
3. 3Why people switch to them"I moved to X because..." — from you or from someone else.
4. 4Why people leave them"I left X because..." — an opportunity signal for you.
5. 5Comparison topicsOn which topics you are compared with them, and in whose favour.

Comparison posts

The most valuable posts compare you with a competitor directly: "A or B?", "has anyone switched from A to B?". They reveal the buyer's selection criteria openly. For each comparison post, note which criterion is being compared (price, speed, service, quality), in whose favour the discussion ends, and whether there is wrong information about you. If there is, a short, factual correction is fine — without running the competitor down.

Selection bias

What is written about a competitor in public sources is not a random sample of its customers. Unhappy customers post more, the competitor's marketing campaign increases positive posts, and some forums lean towards one brand. So do not read the numbers on the sheet as market share or a satisfaction measure. They answer "what is being talked about", not "how many customers are satisfied".

How sales and product use it

• Sales — preparing for comparison questions: acknowledging the competitor's real strength and showing your own advantage with facts.
• Product — if a competitor's praised feature is missing from yours, it may be the standard; their criticised side is an opportunity.
• Marketing — using the criteria buyers use in comparisons in your messaging.
• Customer service — knowing what a customer switching from a competitor expects in the first week.

To rehearse a sales conversation with a customer who compares you with a rival, you can use the scenario in the competitor objection role-play.

The ethical line

• Public sources only; no joining closed groups with fake accounts.
• No collecting profiles of competitors' employees or gathering information about them.
• No posting ads under complaints about a competitor.
• No spreading false or unproven claims about a competitor — that is both an ethical and a legal risk.

Illustrative example

This is an illustrative example. A language school tracks two competitors for three months. The first is most often praised for "strong teachers" and most often criticised for "groups are too big". The second is praised as "convenient online" and criticised for "no results". In comparison posts, buyers most often ask "how many people are in a group?". The school states its group size openly on its website, and its sales managers start raising the question themselves on the first call.

Rhythm

Competitor posts appear as a separate filter in the daily check, but the sheet is updated once a month — updating it more often adds noise. When a competitor runs a big campaign, changes prices or has a service problem, a weekly look makes sense. The monthly summary of the sheet goes into the marketing team's monthly competitor report.

Limitations

Public posts about a competitor are only part of its real customer experience. A competitor's internal numbers — sales, customer count, revenue — cannot be drawn from public discussions, and such guesses should not be written on the sheet. Automatic tone and topic labels are a first sort; check important results by reading the text itself.

Common mistakes

• Looking only at a competitor's negative posts and missing their strengths.
• Concluding "their customers are unhappy" from a handful of posts.
• Not tracking spelling variants of the competitor's name.
• Keeping the sheet in a folder instead of giving it to sales.
• Answering posts about a competitor with advertising.

Competitors with Vexvon Monitoring

In Vexvon Monitoring one search can cover several companies: each has its own keywords and profile, and a result is recorded against the company whose keyword it matched. Competitors named in each post are listed separately, and the "comparison" type separates posts that weigh the brand against a rival. When results are exported to Excel and several companies are involved, each company gets its own sheet. More on the Vexvon Monitoring page.

Next step

Pick two main competitors, build a variant list for their names, and fill in a five-row sheet for each from the last three months of public posts. Discuss the sheet with the sales team in a 30-minute meeting. The hesitations of buyers who have not bought yet are in purchase blockers; other topics are in the competitor and market monitoring section. To look at it together, get in touch.