You post on LinkedIn three times a week. Your competitor posts twice. They get 3x your engagement. Why?
I kept asking myself this question and never had a real answer beyond "their content is better." That's not useful. I wanted specifics. What topics are they covering that I'm not? What formats are they using? What posting patterns work for them?
So I built a tool that runs the comparison automatically.
The problem nobody talks about
Most LinkedIn "strategy" advice is generic. Post more videos. Use carousels. Write hooks. But that advice ignores the most important variable: your specific niche, your specific audience, your specific competitors.
What works for a SaaS founder posting about product updates is completely different from what works for a recruiter sharing hiring tips. You need data from your actual competitive set, not broad averages.
What the tool actually does
You give it two LinkedIn company or creator URLs. It pulls recent posts from both accounts and runs a side by side analysis:
Topic gap analysis: What themes does your competitor cover that you never touch? Maybe they post about industry news every Monday and get solid engagement, while you only post product updates.
Format comparison: Are they using video, carousels, text posts, polls? The tool breaks down the format mix for both accounts and shows where the gaps are.
Engagement benchmarks: Average likes, comments, and shares per post type. Not vanity metrics but actionable patterns like "their video posts get 2.3x the engagement of their text posts."
Posting cadence: When do they post? How often? Is there a pattern to their highest performing content?
Real output example
I tested it on two fintech companies. Here's what came back:
TechCorp vs YourBrand — 30 day comparison
TechCorp: 100% video content, avg 847 reactions/post
YourBrand: 85% text, 15% carousel, avg 312 reactions/post
Topic gaps you're missing:
- Industry commentary (TechCorp: 40% of posts, you: 0%)
- Customer stories (TechCorp: 25% of posts, you: 5%)
Recommendation: Test 2 video posts/week covering
industry news. TechCorp's video format gets 2.3x
higher engagement than their own text posts.
That's specific enough to actually change your content calendar.
How it works under the hood
The actor uses Crawlee with Playwright to visit LinkedIn pages and extract post data. No API key needed, no Sales Navigator subscription. It runs on Apify's cloud infrastructure so you don't need to manage servers or proxies.
The analysis logic compares engagement distributions, runs basic NLP for topic categorization, and generates the recommendations based on statistical gaps between the two accounts.
Pricing
$0.02 per comparison report. Run it weekly on your top 3 competitors and you're spending about $2.40/month for ongoing competitive intelligence. Compare that to social listening tools charging $200+/month.
Try it on Apify: LinkedIn Competitor Intelligence
The first run takes about 60 seconds. You'll know exactly what to change before your next LinkedIn post.
Built in Nairobi. 52 actors in production, 746+ users. Questions welcome in the comments.
Top comments (0)