A Guide to LinkedIn Competitor Analysis
Published on 02.12.2025 by Chizoba T
As of 2025, LinkedIn had over 1.1 billion active users, making it an ideal platform for brands to gain visibility, connect with their target audience, and showcase their products or services. No matter how effective your LinkedIn marketing strategy is, it can still be highly competitive because many businesses target the same audience.
If you want your business to be noticed on the platform, you need to do a LinkedIn competitor analysis to analyze what your competitors are doing. It also requires you to keep track of the industry trends and uncover hidden opportunities. This article will guide you on creating a good LinkedIn competitor analysis strategy.
What is a LinkedIn Competitor Analysis?
A LinkedIn competitor analysis involves studying your competitor’s LinkedIn strategy, performance, strengths, and weaknesses, and comparing them with your own. This can provide you with essential insights such as:
- The profiles in your niche that are growing very fast.
- Competitors who are generating significant engagement.
- Whether your competitors are using ads and what kind of ads they are using.
It is advisable to conduct a LinkedIn competitor analysis at least quarterly or annually. This will enable you to get essential insights to improve your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Why LinkedIn Competitor Analysis Matters
When you analyze your competitor’s strategies and activities, you can get essential insights to help improve your LinkedIn success. Here are the significant benefits you will reap from LinkedIn competitor analysis:
Understand Your Competitors’ Strengths and Weaknesses
Whether your LinkedIn competitors are doing well or poorly on the platform, understanding their strategy can provide essential insights. Therefore, check the type of content they are creating and whether their audience is engaging with it. Pay attention to whether they respond to their followers’ comments.
Get Important KPIs
Competitor analysis will also help you better understand your performance and how it compares to the competitor, and deepen your understanding of your competitor’s KPIs. You can begin by examining the metric you consider most important, such as the follower growth rate and engagement rate. This will reveal significant trends to help you better gauge your LinkedIn strategy.
Understand the General Industry Performance
Competitor analysis can provide a deeper understanding of the industry’s overall landscape. This is especially true when you have a comprehensive competitor analysis strategy that focuses on both direct and indirect competitors. When doing so, follow the hashtags used by brands and creators in your niche to stay informed about the key industry developments.
Observe how brands in your niche are bringing new trends and the type of content campaigns they are running. By understanding what works and what doesn’t, you can easily implement changes in your strategy and enhance your LinkedIn marketing efforts. Therefore, competitor analysis can help you spot opportunities.
Enable Alignment with Recent Trends
A good LinkedIn competitor analysis involves more than just understanding your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. It also consists of discovering LinkedIn trends. You can spot industry trends by:
- Looking at how your competitors are creating trending content.
- Grouping and tapping content for industry trends.
- Monitoring competitor hashtags and mentions.
- Noting the speed at which competitors respond to specific campaigns or trends.
- Checking the types of content influencers and SMEs are posting. Check the trending hashtags with the highest number of posts or views.
- Checking your followers’ reposts.
How to Perform a LinkedIn Competitor Analysis
Follow these steps when performing a LinkedIn competitor analysis:
Determine Your Goal
You need to begin by determining the reason for conducting the competitor analysis. This will provide you with essential insights into what you want to achieve during the research. You need to see the pattern your competitors are following in posting content. Alternatively, you can determine the competitor’s strategy based on their behaviors. Understand how they interact with the online community and clients to get new strategies.
Use the Native LinkedIn App to Collect Competitor Data
You can do this manually by visiting your competitor’s page or leveraging the built-in analytics on the platform. The built-in analytics will show you data such as the competitor's follower count and engagement rate. You can also see your rivals’ data on the Competitors Page. If there are variations in the number of followers, you will notice them.
Competitors’ LinkedIn Page, Content Strategy, and Hashtags
You can visit your competitor’s page for essential data insights, such as engagement rate and interaction level. Use this data to create a competitive analysis report that can be completed manually, utilizing these insights. Check the types of posts your competitors are creating and identify any specific keywords they use. You can use this data to improve your brand strategy.
Observe whether your competitors are using the relevant hashtags. If they are using keyword hashtags, consider how effective these are in increasing the visibility of their content. Consider whether they are using LinkedIn hashtags effectively. Once you observe all these things, pay attention to whether they represent content gaps you can improve.
Monitor how your competitors respond to their followers’ comments, initiatives, and mistakes. Consider the tone of voice they use and how quickly they respond to the customer’s queries.
Check Competitor’s Ad Performance
Another part you shouldn’t forget in the LinkedIn competitor analysis is the ad section, which gives you an overview of their advertising campaigns. By reviewing your competitors' paid content, you can define your focus and increase engagement. Check the social media metrics to see the reach of their paid ads. You can then use the data to determine whether to change your content strategy.
In Conclusion
A LinkedIn competitor analysis can provide essential insights to help you improve your marketing strategy because it will provide valuable insights into your competitors' strategies. You can then use these insights to develop a more effective plan and create better content, staying ahead of the competition.
However, a good competitor analysis requires good planning and strategy. The good news is that by following the steps outlined in this article, you can easily succeed with your LinkedIn social media analysis.