How to size up a competitor's TikTok in 15 minutes

Before a pitch or a quarterly plan, someone always asks "what is the competition doing on TikTok?" The lazy answer is to open the app, scroll their profile, and screenshot a few videos that look good. That tells you what is recent, not what actually worked. The videos a brand posts most are rarely the videos that performed best.

A real teardown ranks their whole catalog by performance and reads the pattern behind the winners. With the data in a spreadsheet, that takes about fifteen minutes.

Step 1: Export the whole profile

Pull the competitor's public videos into a spreadsheet with the profile scraper: enter their handle, choose how many videos to fetch, and export to CSV. Each row carries the caption, play count, likes, comments, shares, saves, and post date. Now you can sort, which the app will never let you do.

Step 2: Rank by plays, then by engagement rate

Sort by plays, descending, to find their biggest reach. Then add one column: engagement rate, roughly (likes + comments + shares) / plays. Sort by that too. The two lists are different on purpose. High plays with low engagement is a video the algorithm pushed; lower plays with high engagement is a video the audience genuinely loved. You want to learn from both, for different reasons.

Step 3: Read the outliers

Open the top ten of each list and look for what they share. You are hunting for a repeatable format, not a lucky hit.

• Format. Talking head, tutorial, skit, product demo, trend participation? One usually dominates the winners.
• Hook. Read the first line of the caption and the on-screen text pattern. Winners tend to share a hook shape.
• Cadence. Check the dates. Did the wins cluster in a stretch when they posted daily, or a specific campaign window?
• Topic. Which subjects repeat across the top videos? That is the vein they have found.

Step 4: Cross-check the topic against the wider trend

Before you copy a competitor's winning topic, check whether it is winning for everyone or just for them. Run a search or hashtag export on that topic and export the top results. If the whole space is performing, it is a trend worth entering. If only they are, they may have an audience advantage you cannot borrow.

Step 5: Write the one-page teardown

Close with a page anyone can act on: their best-performing format, the hook pattern behind it, the topics that repeat, their posting cadence, and one gap, something the audience keeps asking for in the comments that the competitor is not making. To find that gap, export the comments on their two biggest videos with the comment exporter and read what people want next.

Run it the same way each time and the teardown stops being an afternoon of scrolling. It becomes a fifteen-minute habit that judges videos by what they did, not by what caught your eye.