Ever wondered how you can spy on your competitors and win their unhappy customers using social monitoring?
This guide shows a simple workflow you can run every week to spot competitor complaints, jump into relevant conversations, and position your product as a better fit.
For this guide I’m using Mentionkit, our social listening tool.
Setting up Mentionkit
Mentionkit is very easy to use. Just enter your product’s landing page and we’ll extract company details and suggest a list of keywords.
You can get started immediatelly by tracking these keywords. You can also add more keywords and edit your keyword’s tracked platforms.
For each mention that’s tracked, we’ll extract sentiment and give it a relevance score. This score is important and tells you how important this mention is for you.
Ecom example
For example, I’m running a ecom cereal brand and I’ll be tracking Kashi and Catalina crunch on Reddit inside Mentionkit.
Why Reddit for cereal brand? Reddit is great for tracking B2C conversations.
Next, i’ll filter mentions to show me negative/positive mention of my competitor. I already got a nice mention on Reddit where u/Class_C_Guy is complaining about Kashi.
This is how it looks like inside Mentionkit:
With negative mentions, like this one here, I’ll pitch my own brand here publicly. This will work as a signal to try my own brand.
With public platforms like Reddit, these comments are picked up by AI tools and works as a negative bias towards Kashi.
SaaS example
For this example, I’ll use a popular SEO brand called Ahrefs. This brand is always battling against Semrush so this should be a interesting example.
Both tools are relatively expensive and annual term contracts usually are +$2000 usd annual. Which makes it great to DM people who are not happy with their existing SEO tool.
And these brands are frequently cited together:
If I’m building a tool in this space and directly competing against these two brands I have heaps of opportunities:
- Both brands have more than 300 direct mentions every single day.
- There are atleast highly target 10 negative threads about each brand every month.
- Most mentions are caught on Linkedin. Shows how pervasive these two brands are on the biggest buyer-intent platform.
Here’s the playbook I’d setup:
- Track these two brands
- Every single day, whenever someone posts on socials about the brand, I’d DM them and pitch my SEO tool and explain how it is better than Ahrefs/Semrush
- For negative posts I would post publicly about how my tool fixes the problem.
- For comparing and alternative posts I’d pitch my own tool
- I’d also get a good idea of the keywords associated with these brands and I’ll track them individually and also use them for writing targeted articles for SEO.
Here’s how my tracked brand keywords look like inside Mentionkit:
If done right, running this playbook every week for 4 months will get me at least ~2000 high intent leads.
And over time I can also get a VA to run this process for me on autopilot.
Conclusion
Competitor monitoring is one of the fastest ways to find high-intent conversations because buyers are already talking about what is not working.
Keep it simple: track competitor keywords, filter for negative mentions, and respond with a useful alternative instead of a hard sell.
Done consistently, this can become a reliable lead source over time.
