How to monitor competitor social media without it getting weird
Public posts are public. You do not need a fake account, you need a system that shows you what changed without pulling you into a two-hour scroll.
The premise of the question is a little off, so let me fix it first.
You are not doing anything sneaky. A competitor's public posts are published to the entire internet on purpose. Reading them is not espionage, it is reading. Nobody needs a burner account and a disguise to look at a LinkedIn post that a marketing team spent an afternoon writing specifically so that people would look at it.
The actual risk here is not getting caught. It is getting bored, then getting sucked in, and losing two hours you will never get back.
The one real privacy wrinkle
LinkedIn tells people who viewed their profile. That is the only meaningful exception, and it has a private mode setting that solves it in about four seconds.
Everywhere else, viewing is invisible. Reading a public tweet leaves no trace. Watching a public Instagram post leaves no trace. This is a solved problem and it does not deserve any more of your attention.
The actual problem: social is mostly noise
Here is why most competitor social monitoring produces nothing useful.
A competitor posts twenty times a month. Nineteen of them are nothing. A team photo. A conference booth. A blog link. A quote graphic. If you follow them in your main feed, you get all twenty, and you read them all, and by the end you have absorbed a great deal of information and learned nothing.
Worse, you get emotionally involved. You start comparing engagement counts. You feel bad about a post of theirs that did well. None of that is intelligence, it is just anxiety with a business justification stapled to it.
Watch the ads instead
Organic posts are cheap, which is why they are noisy. Ads cost money, which is why they are honest.
A company will post anything for free. They will only pay to say the thing they actually believe converts. Meta and several other platforms publish every ad a company is running, publicly, and you can just go look at it.
That is a far higher signal-to-noise ratio than a feed. If a competitor is spending money to run a specific claim, that claim is their real positioning, tested and paid for.
Watch the language, not the posts
The thing worth catching is not any individual post. It is the drift.
Six months ago they described themselves one way. Now the bio is different, the ad copy is different, the words in the headline have changed. That is a repositioning, and it means they are chasing a different buyer, possibly yours.
You will never notice that by reading posts one at a time. You notice it by checking in periodically and asking a single question: are they describing themselves the same way they were last quarter?
If the answer is no, something changed upstream, and it was not the social media intern who decided it.