Competitor Monitoring Cookbook

Set up competitor monitoring to compare share of voice, reach, engagement, sentiment, platforms, campaigns, and mention examples.

Use this cookbook when you need to understand how your brand performs against one or more competitors.

1. Goal

Competitor monitoring should answer:

• Which brand has the largest share of voice?
• Which competitor is gaining reach or engagement?
• Which brand has the strongest positive or negative sentiment?
• What topics, campaigns, hashtags, or CTAs are driving competitor attention?
• Which competitor mentions should be used as examples?
• What should your team change in messaging, product, PR, or campaign strategy?

2. Define The Competitor Set

Start with a focused list.

Good starting point:

• Your brand.
• 2 to 5 direct competitors.
• 1 aspirational competitor if useful.

Avoid adding too many brands to the first version. Large competitor sets are harder to query, filter, and explain.

3. Create The Project

1. Open Start a New Project.
2. Choose project type Competitor where appropriate.
3. Build a query that captures your brand and competitor names.
4. Run the query.
5. Open Mentions and confirm each competitor is represented correctly.
6. Save the project with a title such as:

Competitor Benchmark - [Category] - [Market]

1. Add topics such as pricing, product quality, campaign, customer support, reviews, features, availability, and reputation.

4. Suggested Query Pattern

Use OR groups for each brand and variation.

("Our Brand" OR OurBrand OR "@ourbrand" OR ourbrand.com)
OR
("Competitor A" OR CompetitorA OR "@competitora")
OR
("Competitor B" OR CompetitorB OR "@competitorb")

Add exclusions for ambiguous names:

("Apple" AND (phone OR iPhone OR Mac)) NOT fruit

If competitor names are too ambiguous, consider separate saved searches or stricter query groups.

5. Configure Sources

Open:

Sidebar -> Settings -> Monitoring -> Social Tracking

Track:

• Official competitor pages where public tracking is supported.
• Competitor hashtags.
• Competitor YouTube channels.
• Review listings.
• Key campaign sources.
• Important public groups or communities.

Use Backfill 30 Days for important competitor sources when recent history is needed and supported. Use From Now Only when you only need future monitoring.

6. Dashboard Review

Open the Competitors tab and review:

• Competitor mention count trend.
• Competitor influence score trend.
• Competitor social reach trend.
• Competitor sentiment bubble chart.
• Platform mention distribution.
• Share of voice.
• Positive, negative, and top engagement competitor mentions where available.

Then open Mentions and inspect examples. Competitor charts without examples are not enough for strategy decisions.

7. Monthly Competitor Workflow

1. Set date range to the month.
2. Review share of voice, reach, engagement, and sentiment.
3. Use 1W or 1M aggregation for trends.
4. Filter by competitor name or topic.
5. Sort Mentions by engagement or influence.
6. Add representative competitor examples to a report.
7. Ask Kommon Poll AI to summarize competitor movement.
8. Verify AI output.
9. Export Slides using a competitor Slide Format.

8. Best Practices

• Keep competitor query logic balanced.
• Include spelling variations equally across brands.
• Use the same date range for comparisons.
• Avoid comparing a broad query for one competitor with a narrow query for another.
• Review high-reach mentions before making conclusions.
• Separate campaign-specific competitor analysis from always-on competitor tracking.
• Use Full Card Data CSV for deep analyst review.

9. Checklist

• Competitor names and variations are included.
• Ambiguous competitor terms have exclusions.
• Competitor sources are tracked where supported.
• Competitor dashboard tabs show usable data.
• Report format includes competitor slides.
• Examples are added to reports.
• Monthly cadence is set.