Competitor Benchmarking

Competitor Benchmarking lets you track competitor social profiles and compare their performance against yours — all from within Viraly. Monitor follower growth, engagement rates, posting frequency, and more so you always know where you stand in your market.

What is Competitor Benchmarking

Competitor Benchmarking is a Viraly feature that lets you add competitor social profiles and automatically track their performance over time. Instead of manually checking competitor accounts for changes in followers, engagement, or content strategy, Viraly collects and organizes this data for you and presents it alongside your own metrics so you can make informed decisions about your content strategy.

With Competitor Benchmarking you can identify what content works for competitors in your niche, spot trends before they peak, and understand how your growth and engagement compare to others in your industry.

Supported Platforms

Competitor Benchmarking currently supports the following platforms:

• Instagram — Track Business and Creator accounts.
• YouTube — Track any public YouTube channel.
• Facebook — Track public Facebook Pages.

Coming soon: Twitter/X, Bluesky, and Mastodon support is currently in development and will be available in a future update.

Plan Availability

Competitor Benchmarking is available on the following plans:

• Business — Up to 5 competitors.
• Agency — Up to 15 competitors.
• Enterprise — Up to 30 competitors.

This feature is not available on the Free or Influencer plans. To access Competitor Benchmarking, upgrade to a Business plan or higher.

How to Add a Competitor

Follow these steps to add a competitor profile to your workspace:

1. Navigate to the Competitors tab from the main sidebar.
2. Click the Add Competitor button.
3. Select the platform you want to track: Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook.
4. Enter the competitor’s username or paste their full profile URL.
5. Review the profile preview to make sure it is the correct account, then click Confirm to add the competitor.

Once added, Viraly will begin collecting data for the competitor profile immediately. Initial data may take a few minutes to populate.

Requirements for Instagram Competitors

To track Instagram competitors, you must have a Facebook Page connected to your Viraly workspace. This is required because Instagram’s Business Discovery API uses a Facebook Page token to fetch competitor data. This is a Meta platform requirement, not a Viraly limitation.

Connecting a Facebook Page is a one-time setup. Once your Page is connected, you can add as many Instagram competitors as your plan allows without any additional configuration.

If you have not yet connected a Facebook Page, Viraly will prompt you to do so when you attempt to add your first Instagram competitor.

What Data is Tracked

For each competitor you add, Viraly tracks a comprehensive set of metrics:

• Follower count and growth over time — See how a competitor’s audience size changes day by day.
• Engagement rate — Calculated from likes, comments, and shares relative to follower count.
• Posting frequency — How often the competitor publishes new content.
• Content type performance — Compare how different formats perform (Reels vs Posts vs Carousels).
• Top performing posts — The competitor’s highest-engagement content ranked by interactions.
• Posting schedule heatmap — A visual breakdown of when the competitor publishes throughout the week.
• Best posting times — The days and times that consistently drive the most engagement for the competitor.
• Top hashtags — The most frequently used hashtags in the competitor’s recent posts.
• Profile change detection — Get notified when a competitor changes their bio, profile picture, or website link.

Comparison Dashboard

The Comparison Dashboard lets you place your own channel performance side by side with one or more selected competitors. Use the dashboard to quickly spot where you are outperforming the competition and where you have room to grow.

The dashboard includes:

• Overlay charts — Plot your follower growth, engagement rate, or posting frequency on the same timeline as your competitors.
• Engagement bar charts — Compare average engagement metrics across all tracked competitors in a single view.
• Sortable leaderboard — Rank all tracked profiles (including your own) by any metric such as followers, engagement rate, or posting frequency.

You can select which competitors to include in the comparison and adjust the date range to focus on the period that matters most to your analysis.

Data Refresh

Competitor data syncs automatically every hour. This ensures your dashboards and comparisons always reflect recent activity without any manual effort.

If you need the latest data immediately, you can manually trigger a sync by clicking the Sync button on a competitor’s profile page. Manual syncs are subject to platform rate limits and may take a moment to complete.

Content Pillars (AI)

Viraly uses AI to automatically classify each competitor’s posts into content themes, known as Content Pillars. These themes include categories such as:

• Educational — Tutorials, tips, how-to content.
• Promotional — Product launches, offers, sales-driven posts.
• Entertaining — Memes, humor, trend-based content.
• Inspirational — Motivational quotes, success stories.
• Community — User-generated content, polls, engagement-driven posts.

The Content Pillars breakdown shows you which themes drive the most engagement for each competitor. Use these insights to refine your own content mix — for example, if a competitor’s Educational content consistently outperforms their Promotional content, that may signal an opportunity for your own strategy.

FAQ

Why do I need a Facebook Page for Instagram competitors?

Instagram’s Business Discovery API requires a Facebook Page token to retrieve data about other Instagram Business and Creator accounts. This is a Meta platform requirement, not a Viraly limitation. Once you connect a Facebook Page to your workspace, all Instagram competitor lookups will use that token automatically.

Can I track personal (non-business) Instagram accounts?

No. Instagram’s API only provides data for Business and Creator accounts. Personal Instagram accounts cannot be tracked through the Business Discovery API. If a competitor’s account is set to personal, it will not appear in search results when adding a competitor.

How far back does the data go?

Data collection begins from the moment you add a competitor to your workspace. Viraly does not backfill historical data from before the competitor was added. Over time, you will build a complete performance history. Data retention follows your plan’s retention limits.