What Your Competitors' Comment Sections Can Teach You
Your rivals' posts tell you what they want to say, but their comment sections reveal what customers actually think, ask, and want. Here's how to read that free market research and turn it into your next week of posts.
Dave Smith
There's a tab open on your competitor's Facebook page right now, isn't there? Be honest. Most small business owners have done a bit of quiet snooping — checking what the shop down the road is posting, how often, whether they've got more followers than you. It's natural. But you're almost certainly looking at the wrong half of the page.
You're reading their posts. You should be reading their comments.
Their posts tell you what they want to say about themselves. The comments underneath tell you what their customers actually think, want, and ask for — in their own words, for free. It's the most honest market research you'll ever get, and your competitors have done all the work of collecting it for you.
Why the comments beat the posts
A business post is a polished message. It's been thought about, maybe drafted twice, possibly run past someone before it went live. It tells you how that business wants to be seen.
A comment is unguarded. When someone writes "do you do home visits?" or "is this the one near the station?" or "gutted you're closed Mondays" underneath a competitor's post, they're handing you a real question from a real customer — the kind of thing people actually wonder about a business like yours. Nobody's polishing those. They're just typing what's on their mind.
And here's the part that should make you sit up: those are very likely your potential customers too. Someone asking your competitor about parking, opening hours, or whether they take card is the same person who'd ask you. If you've already answered that question clearly on your own page, you've just won them before they even arrived.
What to actually look for
Snooping with no plan is just doom-scrolling with extra guilt. So go in looking for specific things.
Repeated questions. If three different people ask the same competitor whether they cater for dairy-free, that's not a coincidence — that's unmet demand. If you do dairy-free and you've never mentioned it, you've found your next post. Repeated questions are the gaps in the market, written out for you in plain English.
Complaints and frustrations. Read the slightly grumpy comments carefully. "Tried to book but never heard back" or "phone just rings out" tells you exactly where a competitor is letting people down. You don't need to gloat or name names. You just quietly make sure your own page promises the opposite — and then you deliver on it.
The language people use. Pay attention to the actual words. Customers might call it a "service" while you've been calling it a "treatment." They might say "near the high street" when you've been writing your full postal address. Mirror the words your future customers genuinely use, and your posts suddenly sound less like a brochure and more like a conversation.
What gets a warm response. When a competitor posts something and the comments fill up with genuine delight — a dog that comes into the shop, a behind-the-scenes mess, a staff member's leaving do — take note. That's a signal about what people in your world actually enjoy seeing. Not to copy it, but to understand the appetite.
Turning what you find into posts
This is where the snooping pays off. Every useful comment you spot can become content on your own page.
Spotted a question that keeps coming up? Answer it as a post. "A few people have asked us this week, so here's the honest answer..." You look helpful and switched-on, and you've saved yourself fielding the same DM ten times.
Noticed customers using particular phrases? Weave them into your captions. Saw a frustration that you happen to solve? Write a post about how you handle that exact thing — no comparison needed, just confidently showing how you do it.
You're not stealing anyone's content. You're listening to a conversation that's already happening in public and joining in with something useful.
A couple of ground rules
Keep this respectful. Reading comments for insight is fair game — every business with a public page has accepted that the world can see it. Going into a competitor's comments to argue, undercut, or stir up their unhappy customers is not. It's a bad look, people notice, and it makes you the villain of someone else's story. Stay on your side of the fence.
And don't fall into the trap of becoming so obsessed with one rival that you start mimicking them. The point isn't to become a slightly worse version of the business down the road. It's to understand your shared customers better than anyone else does, then sound unmistakably like yourself while you do it.
The five-minute version
You don't need a spreadsheet or a research afternoon. Once a week, pick two or three businesses like yours, open their recent posts, and read the comments instead of the captions. Jot down anything that's a question, a complaint, or a phrase you hadn't thought of. That's it. A few minutes of reading hands you a small pile of post ideas rooted in what people genuinely care about — which beats staring at an empty box wondering what on earth to write.
If turning those observations into a steady stream of posts is the bit that always slips, that's exactly the gap Aunty Social fills — it learns your business and keeps the content flowing so a good idea spotted on a Tuesday doesn't quietly die in your notes app. But even without any tools, the habit alone will sharpen everything you put out.
Your competitors have spent years building up a comment section full of honest customer thoughts. The least you can do is read it.