Playbooks · 4 min read
We Do Not Analyze Competitors. Read Your Own Inbox Instead
Two things to get out of the way in the first paragraph, because they decide whether the rest of this post is any use to you.
We have no competitor analysis feature. No rival dashboard, no tracked accounts, no engagement comparison, no "your competitor posted at 7pm and got more saves". None of that is in the product and none of it is planned.
Scraping a competitor's account is against Meta's Platform Terms. Automated collection of another account's followers, commenters or engagement is not a grey area, and it is not something we will describe a method for. The tools that do it are signing into an account and driving the app, which is the same category of software that gets accounts restricted — that staircase is documented separately.
So this post is not the one the title usually promises. What it is instead: the competitive intelligence you already own, which is better than the scraped kind and which almost nobody reads.
Your inbox is the only comparison set that matters
Public metrics on a rival account tell you what they published. They do not tell you what a buyer thought while deciding. Your inbox does, because people say it out loud.
Read three months of your own DMs and comments and you will find the same handful of sentences repeating:
- "Is this same as the one from [other brand]?"
- "Their price toh kam hai, why is yours higher?"
- "I was going to order from X but they don't ship to my city"
- "Does yours also come with the guide?"
- "Someone else told me this takes 15 days"
That is a competitor analysis. It is unscraped, it is first-party, it is specific to buyers who were close enough to ask, and it arrived free.
A rival's follower count tells you about their marketing. A customer's question tells you what you are losing on.
Turning it into something you can act on
This is a manual reading exercise. There is no button.
- Pick a window and read it end to end. Two to three months. Do not skim, and do not delegate it the first time — the value is in noticing your own defensiveness.
- Write down every named alternative. Brands, marketplaces, "my usual place", and doing nothing. Doing nothing is usually the biggest one and it never appears in a competitor tool.
- Sort the comparisons by what they are actually about. Price, delivery, trust, format, availability. Five buckets is plenty.
- Find the objection you answer badly. There is always one where your replies get longer and slightly annoyed. That is the position you have not worked out yet.
- Fix the answer once, properly, then make it a template. Templated replies are free and unlimited here, so the good answer costs nothing to repeat.
Step five is the only place the product does anything for you, and it is worth being precise about how small a role that is. We do not find the pattern. You find it by reading. We make the answer cheap to send consistently once you have written it.
What the Leads export can and cannot tell you
Captured leads leave as CSV. That file is a list of people who asked and what triggered the capture — it is not a market report, and reading it as one produces confident nonsense.
What it is genuinely good for is one narrow thing: which trigger words people actually type. If a competitor's terminology is showing up in your keyword matches — their product name, their branded phrase for a category — that is a real signal that their language has become the default language. Adding those words to your triggers is legitimate; it means answering people who are describing your product in someone else's vocabulary.
What the file cannot tell you is why anyone chose anyone. There is no attribution here, no analytics product, no funnel report. We have no CRM integration either, so the analysis happens in a spreadsheet you open yourself.
What is fair to look at, and how
Everything a normal person can see, looked at the way a normal person looks at it. Open their profile. Read their pinned posts, their captions, the comments under them, their replies. Notice what they answer and what they ignore. This is public and it is fine.
The distinction is not what you look at, it is whether software is harvesting it at volume. Reading a competitor's comment section on your phone is research. A script pulling every commenter into a database is the thing Meta prohibits, and it is also how people end up with a list they cannot legally or technically message anyway, because nobody can DM a stranger on the official API.
The honest scorecard
If you want a competitive comparison of automation tools specifically, the sorted-by-job list is more useful than anything we could generate about your industry, and our own review leads with what we are bad at.
For your own market, the assignment is unromantic: two hours, three months of messages, five buckets, one badly-answered objection fixed. It produces more than any dashboard, and the only reason it is unpopular is that it cannot be bought.
