The Competitor Analysis module collects public data just like we were reading through the social profiles of our competitors. It's an extremely powerful function since it permits to save a huge amount of time when we want to overview the performance of our industry and get some key learnings to inspire our social media strategy. 


On the other side it's really important to always keep in mind the limitations of public data:

  • Data can be slightly inaccurate/incomplete due to temporary errors / downtime of the public data providers of the social networks. If there is an error usually it affects all the social profiles in the same way, so the Competitor Analysis is always a good tool to get an overview and compare different pages/accounts. At any time the results should be taken as a "good approximation" and not like "exact figures".

  • Public data refers only to the content that is visible in the public timeline/home of a given social profile. Posts targeted to reach a specific "custom audience" are not accounted for Competitor Analysis.

  • Public data does not include private KPIs like Reach, Impressions, Link Clicks or any derived metric (Reach Engagement, CTR, etc).

When possible (i.e. if you are administrator of a page/account), we always recommend accessing the private data of the insights section by installing an owned social profile to manage & analyze. Insights metrics are more accurate since a different data provider is used (private data API) and there is a much richer set of private KPIs, only available for the owner of the social profile.