How To Do An Instagram Competitor Analysis In 2024 (Tips & Tools)

Among the most popular social media platforms, Instagram is the one with a large number of audience growing rapidly. With over 2 Billion monthly active users, Instagram has become a profitable platform for many brands. Most users on IG follow one or more brands and interact with their content.

The competition on Instagram can do more good than harm for your brand if you properly do an Instagram competitor analysis before making or implementing any new plans or strategies. This can help you create your place in a tough market and compete against your rivals.

Analyzing competitors on Instagram will help you improve your brand’s user engagement by reaching the targeted audience. So let’s explore some ways and tools that you can use to conduct a good Instagram competitors analysis in 2024.

What Is An Instagram Competitor Analysis?

An Instagram competitor analysis means to track and analyze the activities of your competitors on IG. This data includes the number of likes, followers, followings, comments, and mentions your competitor gets on Instagram.

Competitive analysis is a hidden weapon of marketing that only a few know of. Instead of treading away from your competitors, you can learn much more about improving social media performance by following and monitoring your competitors more closely.

Through these metrics, you get an idea of what makes a brand or a product popular. Knowing this you can create unique strategies to get ahead of your competitors and attract the right audience even though this process can be a little tricky, with the right tips and tools it can be simplified.

How To Do An Instagram Competitor Analysis?

1. Find Competitors

The first step in any social media analysis is to identify your competitors. You need to wisely choose your competitors as the insights from them will influence your decisions greatly. So don’t be biased and create a list of 3-5 competitors including big, small, direct, and indirect players in your industry.

Moreover, select the ones that are active on users and post regularly. There are many ways you can search for your competitors on Instagram such as the following-

Search Keywords:

By raw searching the keywords in the “Accounts” tab in the IG search bar associated with your brand or industry you get results of many accounts that are using the same keywords. You can make a list of these profiles and filter out the ones that associate with your brand or product the most.

Search Hashtags:

In a similar way you can also search for hashtags that resonate with your brand in the “Tags” section in the IG search you’ll get a list of already used hashtags and upon selecting a hashtag you’ll see many posts from different profiles.

This way you can search for different hashtags that people use for different content and you can also find influencers and brands that use hashtags you also want to use.

Use IG Features:

Instagram offers a feature called “Suggested For You” which shows similar profiles to the one you are looking at. Simply click the drop-down menu present on the profile page of any account and you’ll get similar accounts offering the same products or services.

2. Collect Data

After identifying who your competitors are now’s the time to note the basic engagement metrics such as – followers, content type, daily engagements, and hashtags.

• Followers: The number of followers determines your brand’s credibility. Therefore, analyzing the growth in followers of your competitors is important. To do so you can use various online analytics tools some of which are mentioned in this blog.
• Content-Type: The type of content posted by your competitors can tell a lot about the engagement rate of their content. Instagram allows users to post images, videos, and GIFs in the form of posts or stories. The likes, comments, and shares of each post give a rough idea of what the audience likes. On top of that you should also notice the publishing behavior of your competitors i.e. how frequently they post in a day and their active hours.
• Hashtags Used: You also need to notice the type and number of hashtags your competitors use in each post. Right hashtag usage helps your content to show up on the feed of your target audience.
• Engagement Rates: Another important metric to look at is the number of engagements your competitors get on each of their posts daily. This includes the number of likes, shares, comments, and mentions.

3. Analyze The Data

After gathering the basic metrics you need to analyze them and figure out what strategies are helping your competitors to attract user interactions. Compare your profile with your competitors and notice the things that are resulting in higher engagement for you and them.

Note down all the things that your competitors are doing that you can also do to generate high user engagement and reach the right audience. Use similar hashtags and content strategy with minor tweaks to keep the uniqueness of your brand intact.

Also, notice the growth of your competitors and check if they’ve done anything new lately such as using the latest new trends or collaborating with influencers.

4. Repeat The Process

Your work doesn’t end here as you need to repeat the process of collecting and analyzing data on each of your competitors until you conclude each metric. This task can be a bit tiring as it is very repetitive, however, it is important to differentiate the strategies that each of your competitors is using.

Creating a report on each competitor can open up many opportunities for you to improve the performance of your brand on Social media. Moreover, by repeating these tasks you can master Instagram competitive analysis and apply the same strategies on different social media platforms.

5 Benefits Of Conducting An Instagram Competitor Analysis

There are many benefits of conducting an Instagram competitor analysis which can help you boost the performance of your brand and generate high user engagement on your content giving you a strong position against your competitors. Some of the major advantages of an Instagram competitor analysis are:

• Find Latest Trends: By analyzing the content of your competitors you can find new trends and things that the audience likes. Using these trends you can attract a huge number of users to your brand’s profile.
• Know Your Audience: An Instagram competitor analysis helps you identify the right audience and what attracts them. By analyzing the target audience of your competitors you can know the type of audience they are catering to and if you are missing out on an important portion of IG users that you should also be targeting.
• Get Ideas For Content: You can also get different and unique ideas for content to attract a huge audience. Moreover, you also get an idea of what the audience of your competitors dislike by analyzing the user engagements they get on each of their posts.
• Implementation of Strategies: By analyzing the activity of your competitors you get to know how to implement different strategies and ideas on your brand’s page. Furthermore, you also get to notice the mistakes your competitors made while implementing their strategies and avoid them.
• Compare and Improve: Comparing the growth of your profile with your competitors can help you set future goals and improve your brand’s performance.

Tools For Conducting An Instagram Competitor Analysis

There are many tools that you can use to conduct an Instagram competitor analysis and improve your brand’s performance on social media. So here are 4 tools to do competitive analysis on Instagram:

Sprout Social

This tool is great for getting extensive reports on your Instagram competitors. Sprout Social provides deep insight into various metrics that can help you deeply understand the activity of your competitors and apply the same strategies to your brand’s social media.

Social Insider

Social Insider is another tool to get a deep insight into your competitors on Instagram. This tool complies with all the different metrics on a dashboard and gives a brief overview. Additionally, it also shows more detailed data on each metric in the form of charts for you to get an extensive report on your competitors.

Social Status

This is a great tool to analyze the posts of your competitors and also to get historical data on what they were posting some time ago. With Social Status you can track the changes and progress in the content strategy of your competitors.

Hootsuite

To know about the latest trends and real-time audience insights, Hootsuite is the tool for you. With this Instagram competitors analysis tool, you can also create a customized dashboard highlighting only the metrics that you want to work on. Also, this tool is great for social listening and allows you to get insights from users as to what they are saying about a particular brand or product.

Conclusion

Instagram competitor analysis helps brands lay out some groundwork for their social media strategies. Additionally, a competitive analysis allows you to learn from your competitors and avoid the mistakes they made to grow their brand. This way you get many beneficial insights that you can use in creating new strategies and ways to gain more user engagement on your content and not get lost in the feed of your audience.

FAQs

How do you find the competition on Instagram?

There are many ways to find the competition on Instagram such as: searching for brands using the same hashtags, searching for keywords related to your brand, and finding similar pages based on your search results.

Can I follow my competitors on Instagram?

Yes, you can follow your competitors on Instagram as this is important to track and analyze their daily activity and to know what is the difference between you and your competitors.

What is the importance of competitor analysis?

Competitive analysis helps you target and learn from your competitors and plan various strategies to boost your brand’s social media performance. Moreover, an analysis of your competitors saves you time and effort in experimenting with different strategies on social media.