Updated Oct 2026: Find out what's already working for competitors before you create. Same principle as 2014, new tools, plus one 2026 addition: check which competitor pages AI assistants cite. Originally published 2014-03-11 on phillipohren.com.
There’s nothing worse than seeing a competitor performing well and not being able to understand why. In situations like this, timely data is everything. Success online today is all about content – it’s the uniting factor behind everything our customers and users do.
With this in mind, useful & engaging content is one of the key contributors to lifting the performance of digital channels such as EDM, PPC, SEO, Display & Social. SHOUTING at our audience doesn’t work****anymore. Brands have to engage, help or communicate to audiences in order to get them to understand their services or see value in their products.
Content development is always challenging – working out how to engage, answer and sell requires variations of tone, format, and even landscape. I recently came across a tool which will help aid in social-driven insights – enter Social Crawlytics…
The Tool…
It essentially combines a web-crawler and API checker. By entering a competitor’s web address, Social Crawlytics allows you to see the amount of social shares for each page on a website. This enables you to find out what content is accessible at any given time. For example, I could crawl eBay daily and find the most popular listings that were shared on Facebook – this could help me make a ‘Top 10 Weirdest XXXX Sold On eBay’ post with ease.
There are several ways to get content creation insights, but unfortunately, there is no silver bullet (yet) – and I seriously doubt that there will be for some time. The point is, gather everything you possibly can about your market/audience; find out about their desires, challenges or gripes and use it to your advantage. In doing so, you will create lasting owned assets that can be leveraged across all sorts of platforms.
Images are linked to their Wayback Machine copies for now and need re-hosting before publishing. Archived from the Wayback Machine, October 2026.
