Everybody recognizes TikTok’s power, so it’s one of the most competitive platforms. With creators and businesses all fighting for attention, producing high-quality content alone is no longer enough. To grow consistently, you need to look beyond your own account and use TikTok analysis to understand what your competitors are doing well. Regularly analyzing competitor content, formats, and engagement patterns helps you spot opportunities early and refine your strategy in a crowded market.
In this guide, we look at what a TikTok competitor analysis entails, why it’s vital for your brand, and how to effectively conduct one to improve your performance and ranking on users’ For You Pages.
What Is a TikTok Competitor Analysis?
TikTok competitor analysis is the process of identifying creators competing for the same audience as you, evaluating their strategies, and learning from their successes and mistakes.
Some creators assume that it involves watching what others post. However, while true, this is just one part of a competitor analysis. A full analysis also looks at when they post, how often they post, how people react to their content, and what helps them grow. The goal is to understand why they content perform well, not just what was posted.
With effective competitor analysis, you can compete at the same level as brands or creators that are larger than you. The beauty of TikTok is that it’s not led by follower count alone; it’s FYP-driven. If you learn what makes successful accounts perform well, you can apply the same ideas to your own content, even with a smaller audience.
Why TikTok Competitor Analysis Matters
If we’re being honest, TikTok competitor analysis is a lot of work. Is it worth it? Without a doubt. Here are some reasons why:
Surfaces Emerging Trends
TikTok trends can rise and disappear within a few days. If you don’t have your finger on what’s happening on the platform, you’re sure to be left behind and miss out on potentially valuable opportunities for account growth.
Competitor analysis changes all that. It highlights the topics, sounds, formats, challenges, and content styles that are currently popular in your niche, allowing you to join in before they become oversaturated.
Reveals What the TikTok Algorithm Loves
One of the most crucial parts of a TikTok competitor analysis is evaluating rivals’ highest-performing pieces of content. By examining these pieces, you can spot patterns that point to the algorithm’s preferences.
For example, you can identify the content formats the algorithm often pushes, the best-performing video lengths, and the most impactful sounds and hashtags.
Highlights Untapped Gaps
A comprehensive analysis dives into not just what competitors are doing but also what they’re not doing.
By assessing the kind of topics competitors explore, for example, you can identify underserved angles or unexplored issues. This gives you a unique opportunity to be a trendsetter in your niche.
Promotes Audience Understanding
You can only learn so much about your target audience from your current community, especially if you’re just getting started on TikTok. Before you get a lot of exposure, it can be difficult to identify factors like the kind of content your people like and their most active times.
A competitor analysis lets you leverage data from more successful accounts that share your target audience. By studying the content strategies that drive the most engagement (likes, reposts, shares, saves, and comments), you can identify what resonates with your audience. This allows you to better tailor your TikTok strategy to align with target users’ preferences.
Minimizes Guesswork
Unfortunately, gut feeling isn’t reliable on TikTok. To succeed on the platform, you have to understand what users actually love and create content that aligns with their needs and preferences — precisely what a competitor analysis helps with. It reveals everything from the types of content your niche’s audiences engage with to the most successful posting times.
This data can facilitate well-informed content strategy refinement, saving you a lot of time and resources.
Helps With Goal Setting
It’s difficult to know what “good performance” is without a proper industry analysis — you may set the bar too low or too high if you rely solely on your gut.
A competitor analysis shows you how brands in your niche actually perform. This enables you to set well-informed, realistic, and achievable targets.
How to Perform a TikTok Competitor Analysis
Convinced about the value of a competitor analysis on TikTok? Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you run your own:
Step 1: Identify Your Competitors
You can’t conduct a competitor analysis without knowing who to focus on. So, start by identifying the brands or creators competing for your target audience’s attention.
There are 3 major groups of competitors you need to identify:
Direct competitors: Creators in your niche who offer the same products or services as your account. If you’re a landscaper, for example, other landscaping companies are your direct competitors.
Indirect competitors: Creators that don’t offer the same products or services as you do, but that still compete for your target audience’s attention. If you’re a fashion content creator, a beauty influencer may be your indirect competitor.
Aspirational competitors: Accounts outside your niche that do exceptionally well on TikTok. As their name suggests, their purpose is to provide inspiration.
To identify these competitors:
Directly ask your audience about the accounts they love or regularly engage with: Run a poll, host a Live, or ask via video and have them drop their favorites in the comments.
Use TikTok’s built-in search tool: Search for keywords related to your niche and go through the accounts that pop up. For example, you could search “fashion” if that’s your niche.
Use Google: Search for top brands or creators in your niche and look them up on TikTok.
Use social monitoring tools: With tools like Sprout Social or Iconosquare, you don’t need to manually look up competitors. You can set up alerts for keywords related to your niche, industry topics, and brand mentions, to find your competitors.
Step 2: Analyze Competitors’ Positioning and Content Strategies
Once you identify competitors, dissect their profiles and content to understand their strategies. Some key factors to focus on include:
Profile components: Evaluate their profile pictures, usernames, bios, and link-in-bio strategies. This can help you determine how to position yourself for better recognition. It can also surface valuable keywords for your niche and give you ideas on which landing pages to link to.
Content pillars: Identify the kind of content the accounts prioritize. Do they create educational videos? Tutorials? Behind-the-scenes clips? Entertainment-driven content like comedy skits?
Video styles and formats: Find out how they hook their audiences, how long their videos typically are, their video production quality, and their editing styles.
Hashtag usage: Look at the kind of hashtags they use and how many they use per post. Do they use trending hashtags? Niche hashtags? A mix of both?
TikTok feature usage: TikTok offers various content creation features, including Duets, Stitches, polls, stickers, and text overlays. Identify what your competitors use the most.
Posting cadence: How often do your competitors post? When do they typically publish their content?
Sound strategy: Do they use their original sounds or trending TikTok sounds?
Don’t assess these factors in isolation; dig into the numbers as well to get a clear picture of what works and doesn’t. Some key metrics to monitor include:
Video views: Can show you the kind of content the algorithm is currently pushing and what resonates best with TikTok users.
Average views: Shows you accounts’ typical performance. It’s more reliable than video views alone, as it can help you identify consistently successful strategies, not just one-hit wonders.
Engagements: Metrics such as likes, shares, saves, comments, and reposts can help you identify what your target audience finds valuable.
Follower growth rate: Can help you identify consistently growing competitors and stagnant ones.
Assessing positioning and content strategies alongside performance metrics can help you identify what drives success on TikTok. For example, if you notice that behind-the-scenes videos with trending sounds register the most average views and engagements, you’ll know to incorporate such content into your TikTok strategy.
Step 3: Analyze Competitors’ Audiences and Engagement Tactics
Success on TikTok isn’t driven solely by great content; it’s also engagement-driven. Engagement is one of the most powerful value signals for the TikTok algorithm. The more your audience engages with your content, the more valuable it appears. So, the algorithm pushes it to more FYPs.
This makes it important to evaluate competitors’ audiences and their engagement strategies as well.
One important thing to look at is how people feel about your competitors. Are comments mostly positive, negative, or neutral? Do viewers keep asking for the same types of videos or sharing similar complaints?
Paying attention to audience reactions can help you spot missed opportunities. For example, if people often ask a competitor for behind-the-scenes content and never get it, you can create that type of video and attract their attention to your account.
Next, look at how competitors interact with their audience. Notice whether they start conversations, reply to comments, and respond in a timely way. Pay attention to how they involve their community, such as encouraging UGC and sharing it on their own pages. Checking how this type of engagement affects performance can help you understand what works and apply those ideas to improve your own account.
Step 4: Turn Your Analysis into Action
After completing your analysis, consolidate the data collected and refine your current TikTok strategy. Some key questions to ask include:
Do successful accounts’ profiles have anything in common? This will help you optimize your own profile.
Which content formats receive the highest average views and engagements? This can help you brainstorm content ideas.
How often (and when) do successful competitors post? This can inform your posting schedule.
How are high-performing competitors leveraging TikTok features? This will show you which features to incorporate into your TikTok journey.
What gaps are competitors not exploring? This reveals opportunities for your account to shine.
How do accounts in my niche perform? This allows for well-informed target-setting.
TikTok Competitor Analysis Mistakes
Unfortunately, not all TikTok competitor analyses help accounts grow. Here are some mistakes that might affect your data’s reliability and derail your growth:
Ignoring Failed Content
It’s easy to focus entirely on top-performing competitor content. After all, this is what you need to emulate to register success on TikTok.
However, failed content is just as valuable. It shows you what audiences (and the TikTok algorithm) don’t like, so you know what to avoid.
To truly understand TikTok and its users, look for patterns in both successful and failed content. Are there similarities in how failed videos hook their audiences? If so, avoid the tactics. What do the profiles of stagnant accounts look like? Compare them to successful accounts’ profiles to see how to present yourself.
Imitating Strategies
Data from your competitor analysis should be a guide for your own strategy, not a blueprint. Copying everything successful competitors do could see you lose your authenticity. Further, what works for one creator may not necessarily work for you.
Rather than copying everything competitors do, exactly how they do it, find the principles behind their strategies and test out different tactics. For example, if you find that competitors who post seven times a week get a lot of views and engagement, don’t just jump straight into publishing content seven times a week. You have to consider whether you can provide seven valuable videos every week — the last thing you want to do is sacrifice content quality for consistency.
The same goes for your content. Don’t switch your video format and style abruptly to copy what competitors are doing. List several successful content tactics, and A/B test them to identify what resonates with your specific audience.
For quick A/B tests, create multiple testing accounts with GeeLark. Geelark is an antidetect platform that helps isolate multiple TikTok accounts via multi-account browsers and cloud phone profiles. Each of these profiles comes with a unique digital fingerprint, so each TikTok account looks like it is being used on a different device. What’s more, you can customize each profile’s proxy settings to point to a different location.
With GeeLark’s profiles, you can test out different tactics simultaneously, all without raising red flags. For example, you can post a 30-second tutorial on one account, a one-minute tutorial on another, and a two-minute tutorial on another to find the ideal video length for your account. You can also test different content formats, hashtags, posting times, and TikTok features.
Competitor analysis is no longer just something nice to do. With TikTok becoming increasingly competitive, it’s a necessity. A proper analysis shows you what your competitors are doing and whether it’s working, providing valuable insights to help you elevate your own presence on TikTok.
With Geelark by your side, you can test out multiple competitor-analysis-informed tactics simultaneously to find what specifically works for your account. The platform provides multi-account browsers and cloud phone profiles, allowing you to create testing accounts and isolate them to avoid TikTok detection.
Without a doubt. A proper analysis surfaces emerging trends and competitor gaps, which can inform your content strategy. It also gives you a better understanding of what TikTok audiences (and the algorithm) love, minimizing guesswork in your content creation journey.
Manual competitor analysis is not feasible, especially when you’re targeting multiple rivals. To streamline the process, lean on AI-powered tools like Sprout Social and Brand24. They can help with everything from social listening to audience sentiment analyses, lightening your workload.
Pay attention to content, growth, and engagement metrics. Specifically, track video views, average views, follower growth rate, likes, comments, shares, saves, and reposts. These metrics can help you identify the kind of content and engagement tactics that resonate with TikTok users.
TikTok is constantly evolving, as algorithm updates, new creators, and trends continually join the chat. To stay updated on what’s happening and what’s currently working, run competitor analyses every quarter.
Hi, I’m Lizzie! I’m a content writer, strategist, and thought leader in the SaaS space. I work with ecommerce software brands, SaaS companies, and digital marketing teams to grow their authority, visibility, and conversions with engaging, search-inspired content.
Fun facts: I’m an identical twin, I’ve done the highest bungy jump in the world, and I used to race donkeys (yes, that’s a thing).
