Instagram is one of the most popular social media networks for social media managers and influencers to show off their content. It’s clear why. With a massive user base and the ability to create eye-catching visual content in different formats gives all sorts of content creators the chance to highlight their creativity. However, simply focusing on your own content is not all that you should be doing in order to build an effective Instagram strategy. Understanding your competitors, how you compare to them, and, perhaps most importantly, what you can learn from them are all important aspects of the overall Instagram competitor analysis process. While you may think that getting actionable insights from content creators in your industry or posting is difficult, the reality is that everyone who is active on Instagram, even beginners, can use data-based Instagram competitor analysis approaches to improve their performance. 

You might be wondering how to effectively analyze other Instagram accounts. Don’t worry, we will go through everything you need to know to use data-based approaches to accurately benchmark your performance against competitors and better understand what makes content successful. To start, we will go through the entire process of how to analyze an Instagram account using a variety of data-based approaches. We will then explain what you should consider when searching for the best tool for Instagram analytics to get the most out of your research. This will all be done with an aim of showing you that Instagram competitor analysis and its benefits are accessible to anyone looking to improve their profile’s performance.

The Steps to Conduct Instagram Competitor Analysis

We will now present the process of analyzing Instagram accounts that will be helpful for those just starting to grow their following, as well as those who manage established accounts already.  Each step represents a building block to using various analytical and data-based approaches that help your actual performance. The main parts of the Instagram competitor analysis include: 

1. Identifying your Instagram Competitors
2. Setting Up your Data Sets
3. Creating a Benchmarking Report
4. Undertaking Content Optimization Analyses
5. Applying what your Learned

Step 1: Identify your Instagram Competitors

Do you know who all your competitors on Instagram are? If not, do you know how to find your competitors on Instagram? The answer to both these questions will vary from person to person, but it is important to understand the importance of understanding exactly how many competitors are out there. The term “competitors” here refers not so much to those who may have a business offering similar products or services to your own, although this would obviously also count as competitors. Rather, our use of “competitors” is referring to profiles that are competing for, or are trying to attract, a similar target audience as you are. This can be other businesses, influencers, or just people who are interested in the similar content topics. While you may be competing against them in some ways for views, there may or not necessary be a “winner-take-all” direct competition between profiles you identify as competitors.  

For many of those looking to do Instagram competitive analysis, you may already have an idea of what other profiles you want to include in your answers. Others may have a few initial competitor profiles in mind, but also know that there are a lot of other relevant ones that they are not familiar with. However, no matter what situation applies to you, knowing how to find your Instagram competitors is important. First, even if you think that you know all your competitors or similar profiles, you may be missing some important ones. Second, conducting researching into possible competitor profiles can help you get a better understanding of your field and the different voices that are active in it. Having an extensive list of competitor profiles is important since, as we will discuss in the next step, this then allows you to acquire more data points for your analysis in helping discover content optimization tips (more on this shortly). 

One of the keys in learning how to find Instagram competitors quickly and efficiently is by finding the right social media discovery tool that helps you in the process. A research tool that helps you discover new profiles is important in this regard, especially if there are a number of other profiles in your content field or industry that you may not know of. In reality, searching for similar profiles manually can be time-consuming and may not be highly effective at finding all relevant profiles. Luckily, various types of these discovery research tools come as part of an all-in-one social media tool.  

Step 2: Setting Up an Instagram Competitor Analysis Data Set

Once you identify your competitors, it is time to add them to your tracking dashboard. Keep in mind that the more competitor profiles you are tracking, the better. Ultimately, the biggest benefit of tracking potentially dozens or hundreds of profiles is that you have more data points to analyze, which should give you more confidence in your findings. As an aside, it is for this reason that the best Instagram competitor analysis tools will most likely have unlimited profile tracking so you can collect and analyze large data sets. Additionally, the amount of historical data you can access is an important factor here, since you would most likely want to take advantage of analyzing different timeframes. 

This brings us to another essential point to understand, namely the way that the timeframes you select for your analysis can change your results. For instance, analyzing only a month of data will give you more precise insights for a particular month or time of the year, while an entire year’s worth of data would give you more data points, but a more general look at a wider timeframe.

The main point is that the profiles you include in your data set and the timeframes you choose to analyze will ultimately influence your results. The choice of how to build your data set is up to you, but keep this point in mind when we discuss the benchmarking and competitor analysis approaches we will discuss below.  

The last point to emphasize here is that you should come into any Instagram competition analysis project with a clear understanding of your goals are and what you are trying to accomplish. Simply saying that you want to learn what your competitors are doing is generally not enough. We will shed more light as to what you can hope to accomplish in the rest of the article, but you should always clearly define about what you want to get out of it. Are you looking to set accurate benchmarks for growth or engagement ranks? Are you looking for content optimization insights from your competitors? Most likely, you will want to do a combination of many things, but it is essential that you have clear goals in mind when you start.  

Now that we have an overview of what you need to do to set up your analysis, you need to go out and ultimately select the profiles and timeframes that will define your overall data set. Once this is done, you are ready to get going with your competitor analysis. However, we simply don’t want to talk about this in theoretical terms, and therefore will take you through the different analyses you can conduct with a real-world example. With this case study, we will provide you with more than simply a brief explanation about how to do Instagram competitor analysis, but also give you insights into how best to approach your research.

In this article, we will examine the Instagram accounts of prominent watchmakers. Watches are worn by many of us every day. There is, of course, a practical use for them, but they are often advertised in a way that emphasizes how they look. Many watch brands obviously want to show off the style of their watches, which makes Instagram a great social media network for this type of content. For this reason, we will analyze the following 10 watch brands (in alphabetical order) will be part of our example analysis: BREITLING, BVLGARI, Cartier, Chopard, Hublot, Longines, OMEGA, ROLEX, TAG Heuer, and Timex. We will now move to showing you how to conduct different benchmarking and content optimization analyses using the Fanpage Karma social media tool.  

Step 3: Creating a Benchmarking Report

Now that we know the different profiles that make up our data set (which will most likely be in addition to your own) we can now start with the benchmarking analysis. A benchmarking analysis is a logical first step in the process so you can better understand how your profile stands in relation to other similar ones. In conducting a benchmarking analysis, we first need to first determine metrics to analyze. Generally, every effective Instagram profile analysis tool should allow you to pick from dozens of different metrics to analyze. Also, keep in mind that finding a tool that allows you to analyze enough profiles to make your benchmarking study meaningful, since you will be brining in more competition profiles to your analysis. 

An Instagram profile analysis, which is part of an overall benchmarking study, is focused on comparing various profiles across many different metrics. Some of the most common metrics to track relate to total number of followers, follower growth rate, engagement rate, and post interaction rate. You may also be interested in other various metrics as well, such as the overall number of posts in a specific time period, the number of (organic) likes per post, as well as the number of posts per day. As seen in the metric table below, you can get a good overview of what profiles are performing the best and even filter for the metric you are interested in to find top performers. 

Benchmarking is also often about setting goals, and a good benchmarking report would help you set accurate goals. For instance, you may be interested in your competitors’ engagement rate on Instagram. In this case, you could calculate an average for your industry to better set your own goals. Or maybe you want to see how fast your own profile should be growing and want to know the average growth rate in your industry. These types of calculations are easy to do with the right benchmarking tool and can even be adjusted for the specific timeframe you are interested in. Below we see a calculation of the average follower growth rate and engagement rate for the profiles in our data set for Summer 2024 (June, July, August). You can then use these to set your own goals, so you can aim for numbers that are above average.  

Also, keep in mind that there are numerous other analyses you can do here, whether it is comparing the correlation between two metrics in a metric table, taking a closer look at growth trends, or tracking progress across metrics in general. This brings us to the final point, which is to stress the importance of continual tracking. If you want to better understand the trends of your Instagram competitors, then monitoring their progress closely over time can help you see who might be improving their performance and who is falling behind. This can give you clues about what profiles you want to pay special attention to going forward. 

Step 4: Undertaking Content Optimization Analyses

Once you have conducted your benchmarking study and set up long-term tracking, you then will have a better idea of what profiles are most successful, how you compare to other similar profiles in your industry, and specific goals to make which are tied to your own performance. The next step is to analyze your competitor’s profiles to better understand WHY these accounts are successful. Mostly, you probably want to know what you can be doing better to improve your own performance.

The answer is to conduct content optimization analyses that use data-based approaches.  You may initially be searching for some sort of Instagram analyzer tool that gives you insight on private accounts. While there are helpful tools that exist that can give you an overview of your performance and some initial tips based on what other similar accounts are doing, conducting data-based content optimization analyses is what will really help you find optimization potentials. With the right tool, you can analyze competitors on Instagram are doing and discover what aspect(s) of their strategy are working well for them.  

We have covered content optimization insights in general before, but we will discuss a few of the different approaches you can take to optimize your content. The first is to conduct a best time to posts analysis to find when you should be posting. A best times to post analysis is incredibly useful since you are analyzing your own historical data as well as your competitor’s data so you can analyze more data points. 

We go into detail about how to set up an Instagram best time to post analysis so if you are interested, read our article about that. Here, the important point to stress is that the profiles you bring into your analysis should be focused on a similar industry or content niche and are posting in relatively similar timezones. The chart below displays the frequency and the average post interaction rates for posts during a specific timeframe (green circles indicate higher post interaction rates and larger circles represent more posts): 

You can research the best hashtags in terms of engagement rate. Similarly to finding the best times to post, Instagram hashtag analysis allows you to bring in our own data as well as that of other similar profiles, so you can analyze the performance of individual hashtags. You can also conduct a similar analysis with keywords and the average engagement and post interaction rates of posts with specific words. Keep in mind that keywords represent trending topics so you can, with this approach, better understand what topics are trending and popular. 

Moreover, researching the most successful content formats can really help you determine what format you should choose for your own content. As you see from the chart to the right, for the posts with pictures had a higher average post interaction rate than Carousels or Reels. The period of analysis for this chart comes from Summer 2024 (June, July, August) for the selected profiles. 

Finally, a tagging analysis as a powerful approach you can take to study various characteristics of posts and discover links between content and engagement. The tagging analysis process involves creating various tags that correspond to different aspects of a post. For example, you can create tags that will be assigned to a post when images contain pictures of your products or not, a specific number of people (1, 2, 3, etc.) or various other categories. Other tagging analyses can be conducted for specific campaigns or other aspects of images and videos. If you are interested in learning more about a tagging analysis, we have written an article about how to conduct one in order to research engaging social media content. In this article, it is simply important to emphasize that, when talking about Instagram analytics to study your competitors, a tagging analysis can help you explore all sorts of correlations between different characteristics of content and key metrics.

With the right Instagram analysis tool, there are almost endless analyses you conduct to explore different correlations, trends, and best practices. At the end of the day, it is up to you to determine what types of analyses you want to do to achieve your goal. Using your own data and the performance data from your competitors’ profiles and posts can give you a real advantage when crafting your own Instagram strategy.

Step 5: Applying what you Learned

After reading through the different benchmarking and content insights analysis you can do above, you have a better idea of the approaches you can take to analyze an Instagram account. However, an in-depth competitive analysis on Instagram can only take you so far if you don’t act on what you discover in terms of content optimization. For example, if you have researched the best posting times for your industry, that means you should post at the times that are ideal for high post interaction rates. Moreover, if you see one content format that you should be using, then it makes sense to plan to use that content format more often than others. 

In planning your posts, you can always consider using a publishing tool that allows you to schedule your posts at the ideal times and comes with an integrated Instagram hashtag generator alongside other features. Additionally, social media planning tools can help you and your team organize tasks and help you plan your posting schedule effectively.

Lastly, don’t forget about community management after your post. Posting is (clearly) an essential factor in growing your following and generating engagement, but is not the only factor. It is important you are active in engaging with your community, answering their questions, responding to their comments, etc. There are community management tools that can help you and your team manage and efficiently respond to all the messages you receive and comments on your posts.

Looking for an Instagram Competitor Analysis Tool

You can always begin by looking for a simple Instagram account analyzer that helps you quickly find out ways you can optimize your Instagram profile. These can be a great help to get you started and show you some basic things that you could be doing better. However, if you really want to take your Instagram activities to the next level, then finding a powerful social media tool that gives you the ability to analyze your competitors’ profiles while giving you actionable insights is a must.

When researching Instagram competitor analysis tools, remember that you would ideally be looking for one that excels in the various steps outlined above. Therefore, the best Instagram analytics tool would most likely include the following features:

1. Unlimited profile tracking, which enables meaningfully large data sets
2. Research features that allows you to discover other similar Instagram profiles 
3. Powerful benchmarking capabilities across dozens of metrics
4. In-depth content analyses and insights to uncover optimization potentials 

Moreover, if you are searching for the best Instagram analytics tool for your all your activities on Instagram, keep in mind that many would likely be an “all-in-one” tool with community management and publishing features. 

Conducting your own Instagram Competitor Analysis

Conducting competitive analyses on Instagram is greatly enhanced with a powerful tool that helps you find optimization opportunities while giving you an accurate comparison between your own and other similar Instagram profiles. If you are looking for a tool like this, then you can try Fanpage Karma’s free 14-day trial. This is one of the best analytics tools for Instagram analyses since it gives you the ability to track and analyze an unlimited number of profiles. Remember, this is essential for building large enough data sets for the various benchmarking and content optimization insights you want to generate. Fanpage Karma is an all-in-one social media tool offering advanced benchmarking and content optimization insights along with community management, publishing, and research features. 

There is also a free weekly webinar that shows you how you can improve the performance of your Instagram and other social media profiles.