How To Start An Instagram Competitor Analysis | Socialinsider

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When you start your brand’s Instagram account, you cannot anticipate how overwhelmed you may feel due to the load of data about your industry, niche and competitors.

You have to keep up with the fast pace of the marketing world where everything is shiny, everyone seems to be better than you and you may feel small and discouraged.

With the right competitive analysis tools, the “I can” attitude, patience and a lot of work, you will undoubtedly succeed.

Today I am going to show all you need to know about competitor analysis on Instagram and how it can help your brand thrive. Are you ready?

An Instagram competitive analysis relies on developing an evaluation in which you compare your brand’s productivity with your competitors’ productivity, while looking at a lot of factors like type of content, the values of your metrics and latest campaigns.

When you collect and review a lot of data about your rivals, it is then easier for you to find the perfect formula to stimulate your brand’s growth.

With this evaluation, you can establish what makes your product or service unique, and therefore what attributes you play in order to attract your target market.

By analyzing your Instagram competitors' accounts and monitoring them on an ongoing basis, you’ll get to know their behavior, enabling you to anticipate their actions and be one step ahead.

Finding out who your Instagram competitors are is an essential tactic to determine what kind of threat they present to your financial well-being.

In order to develop a killer competitive analysis on Instagram (or any other social media platform), the first step is to establish who is your competition.

There are three types of competitors:

Take these florists accounts for example: @theflowerseekers, @mossandstonefloraldesign, and @floretflower - the common product they sell are flowers.

For example, if you own a bakery, an indirect Instagram competitor for your business is a restaurant.

Developing an Instagram competitive analysis will prove to be very efficient for your brand, both on short and long term.

If you gather data from your Instagram competition, it will help you better understand where to place your products or services in the marketplace.

Social media is like an ocean and getting to be noticed (without being eaten) among so many sharks can be challenging. Every new angle you find can give you a fresh perspective on how to adapt to the waters you’re swimming in.

Here are 7 reasons and advantages for developing a social media competitive analysis on Instagram.

By looking at data, you will feel empowered since you’ll get the chance to look at things differently.

This analysis will offer you clarity. You will understand a lot of things about your audience and your rivals, learning about the most engaging type of content and common mistakes in your niche.

Knowing what content your target audience likes to engage with and consume is essential to every Instagram marketing strategy.

Socialinsider's feature called "Posts Newsfeed" can help you achieve exactly that. Below we will look at how you can use this feature to discover your Instagram competitors' posts. We selected the period for the last six months.

Then, you'll see at the top of the dashboard the most engaging Instagram posts, along with their caption and some metrics.

This will give you an idea of what people post and also brainstorm content ideas for your brand.

By always being aware of the latest trends, you increase your chances of developing engaging content that addresses the “now”. And what’s a better way to cater your audience?

Implementing new trends into your products and services will help you sale faster, targeting exactly those who are interested in what’s new in your industry.

To identify the latest trends in your industry, you can use a listening or monitoring tool which could offer you the latest insights.

At the same time, you should keep an eye on your competitors to make sure you are always a step ahead of them.

Does your audience spend more time watching Reels, or maybe on Instagram stories? Knowing where users spend the most watch time gives you an upper hand over your Instagram rivals.

Based on the research you do above, you can narrow your focus only on a few Instagram features.

Keep in mind that 49.02% of Instagram stories are video, and they outperform image stories on tap forward, according to our Instagram stories study.

While you perform an Instagram competitor analysis, make sure you also check for gaps in your rivals' content.

What do I mean by gaps? Maybe your Instagram competitors' content is a little bit dry, or they do not respond to comments. Or they post too rarely. You can take advantage of any of these scenarios.

You can also find different angles of the same story or put your own experience behind it.

For example, behind-the-scenes story videos can showcase your unique personality and brand values.

You audience will familiarize with your brand and it will be easier for them to establish a connection when they see the person behind the business.

As you gain essential knowledge about what your Instagram competitors are posting and being mindful about your own content, you can find a common ground between the two and overpower your current Instagram content strategy.

Creativity comes while you are getting inspired by other big players from your niche. Look at what your Instagram competitors are doing and develop your original spin of that type of content.

Knowing where you stand against your Instagram competitors, with the help of a simple competitive analysis, will bring you huge benefits.

Socialinsider offers you the benchmarking feature, which is so easy to use. Just drop some of the competitors' URLs of their social media profiles and then hit "Search."

This Instagram competitor analysis will give you a clear idea of what your rivals are doing, good and bad.

The fun part about working on a social media strategy is the testing part. You can test different features to see if they work or not.

For example, upload a short video up to 15 seconds as an Instagram Reel. Come back in a few days and see how it performed.

If you think it didn't bring you any returns in the time you invested in its creation, you can ditch Reels from your Instagram content strategy.

According to this method, do the same with the rest of the content types. Invest some time to play with them and double down on what works best for you.

To make sure you perform a correct Instagram competitive analysis, you must choose the most important Instagram metrics to analyze.

Followers: The number of followers represents how much social proof a brand has. Social proof is essential in order to stand out in the eye of the potential customer.

Posts: The number of posts is also important. You can see how many posts your rivals are posting and tailor your content calendar based on it.

Likes: Likes validate the quality of a specific post. Also, they give you a sense of achievement that feels good and urges you to replicate the same actions that got you there.

Comments: This is basically the feedback you receive for an Instagram post. Based on the comments, you can see if a post is constructive, motivating, inspiring, or offensive. Comments are another metric that drives engagement.

Engagement: This metric breaks down in two separate metrics: Instagram engagement rate/post and Instagram engagement rate/page.

Engagement rate per post means how many total reactions a post receives.

The engagement rate per page represents how many total reactions an Instagram page receives.

Video Views: This metrics shows you the number of times your videos and Reels got viewed by users.

Video Watch Rate: Through this metric, you can find out how much time users spent watching your video content.

CTR: CTR or Click-through Rate accounts for the number of times users have clicked through your content while scrolling through your posts.

Top hashtags: This metric represents the most used hashtags that your Instagram competitors are using.

They can be a factor to drive growth to your page if used over time. Some say that you should put the hashtags in the captions, and some argue on the contrary.

We say that you can choose to place them wherever you want. Remember that hashtags have the power to make your content viral.

After we got familiar with what is an Instagram competitor analysis, what are the advantages, and how to establish who your Instagram competition is, it's time to develop a report with all of these.

For instance, if you want to analyze your Instagram competition with the help of Socialinsider, follow the upcoming steps:

Step 2: Select the period of time on the top right corner.

After that, you'll be able to get a full list of Instagram metrics, such as:

Step 3: Download the report by clicking the "Download" button from the right corner of the dashboard to have access to your Instagram competitors' data whenever you'd like.

You can also do a head-to-head comparison on Instagram and see how you stack up on the most engaging social network.

Finally, after performing an Instagram competitor analysis, you'll have a better idea and understanding of what your Instagram competitors are doing.

Take advantage of all the information you gathered about each Instagram competitor and identify particular areas that need improvement.

Use what hashtags your Instagram competitors use, add a location, use the same filter, or anything that will increase your engagement level.

In the end, you can take their experience as a good or bad example, using it to your benefit.

Socialinsider provides users a thorough competitive analysis since you can develop benchmarks to see everything about your competitors and campaigns where you can compare the performance of several brands.

Brand24 is mostly a social listening tool, but it can also incorporate features related to competitors. By using this tool, you can track online conversations about your brand and your competitors.

With Social Status , you can check all your competitor’s posts. The best part about it is that you can also include historical data about your competitors, checking what they did a long time ago.

Brandwatch is a social media marketing tool that shows competitor top posts analysis and competitor benchmarking.

Sociality.io is a specialized competitor analysis that performs sentiment analysis, offers profile analytics and is also used for social monitoring.

Hootsuitehas analytics and listening features and offers real-time audience insights. The good part about it is that it provides trends analysis.

Phlanx is an Instagram engagement calculator, providing you the number of followers of your competitors.

Ahrefs is a tool which helps you find out which are top organic keywords based on URLs. Then, you can check how much traffic your competitors have.

SocialBlade can help you check out the performance of bigger brands. It also offers you data about followers count and a daily update about the number of followers.

Wappalyzer reveals what technologies are used on every website. This tool works as a Firefox add-on.

BuiltWith is a competitor analysis tool which provides infos like lead generation, business intelligence and e-Commerce data about competitors.

SEMrush is a very useful app for digital marketing, equipped with a lot of features and over 30 million tools which can analyze 3.7 billion keywords. Isn’t that cool?

All these insights related to competitive analysis on Instagram have surely brought a bit of light in the sea of darkness and unknown that is online marketing.

By keeping an eye on your competitors, you have a lot to learn, from “to do’s” to “to don’ts”. The insights you gain are useful when designing your own content strategy to attract more clients.

Hopefully this complete guide about competitor analysis on Instagram comes in handy. In case you have misunderstandings or questions, I’d be happy to help.