What is the best way to find out what topics people connect with my brand and competitors?

Social listening and consumer intelligence SaaS

Understanding what topics people naturally connect with your brand and your competitors shows you what you actually stand for in the market versus what you wish you stood for. It helps you see which themes you own, where rivals are winning the conversation, and where there are gaps no one has claimed yet. With that map, you can sharpen your positioning, adjust messaging, and invest in the narratives that matter most to your audience.

Identify the channels where your audience is active the most:

• Start with your existing data: UTM tags, referral sources, CRM fields, and “How did you hear about us?” answers.

• Combine this with audience interviews and competitor analysis—where do they post, run ads, and get engagement?

• Prioritize channels where your ideal customers both talk about problems and react to brands.

Define clear, organized sets of search terms your tool should look for in order to filter, compare, and analyze mentions consistently instead of searching ad hoc. This includes brand names, products, people, competitors, hashtags, and common misspellings, grouped by purpose, for example brand vs. competitor.

Identify the social media sources where your audience would be present the most:

• X: co-mentioned hashtags and phrases near your brand name.

• Reddit: common themes in threads where your brand and competitors appear.

• YouTube: titles/description keywords + recurring words in comments.

Collect the data related to the defined keywords and tag or auto-classify mentions by topic. Start with a short list like: “pricing,” “UX/usability,” “features,” “performance,” “support,” “values/ethics,” “community,” “competitor comparison.” As new posts come in, apply one or more topic tags. Review and refine the list so it matches how people actually talk.

Next, analyze volume and co-occurrence:

• For your brand and each competitor, see which topics appear most often.

• Look at “brand + topic” combos (e.g., “{Brand} + pricing” vs. “{Competitor} + pricing”).

Layer in search and content data:

• Build co-occurrence maps: what words/topics frequently appear with your brand (e.g., “expensive,” “fast,” “buggy,” “support”).

• Compare your map with competitor topic maps.

• Identify white spaces (topics competitors own that you don’t, or vice versa) to guide positioning and messaging.

Finally, turn this into a simple report: top 5 topics for your brand vs. each competitor, with example quotes. That becomes your living “association map” for positioning and messaging. When you regularly map which topics cluster around your brand and competitors, you replace gut feel with a living, evidence-based view of what you stand for in people’s minds. This lets you double down on the associations that support your strategy, systematically repair the ones that don’t, and deliberately move into white-space territories others are ignoring. Over time, that “association map” becomes a practical steering wheel for brand, PR, content, and product decisions.