How to Do An Instagram Competitor Analysis - A Detailed Guide

Name any niche—beauty, entertainment, or SaaS. Instagram is crowded with brands in all of them.

So, how do you make space for your brand? How do you find gaps your team can capitalize on?

The easiest way to do this is to run an Instagram competitor analysis. It will give you insights on how to shape your Instagram marketing strategy and come out as the winner.

In this article, we’ll give you the exact steps on how we run our Instagram competitor analysis, what data to include in a competitive analysis for Instagram, along with some tools you can use to get a quick start.

Key takeaways

• Running a competitive analysis on Instagram helps brands benchmark performance, uncover content gaps, and adapt winning strategies from competitors.
• This process involves the following steps: identifying competitors, collecting performance data, analyzing content strategies, discovery strengths and weaknesses, and comparing KPIs to industry standards.
• Important metrics to analyze when running an Instagram competitor analysis are: reach and impressions, engagement rate, follower growth rate.
• Helpful tools for running an effective competitive analysis on Instagram are: Socialinsider, Mentionlytics, SparkToro.

What is an Instagram competitor analysis?

An Instagram competitor analysis is the process of evaluating your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses to understand how your own performance compares and where you can gain a competitive edge.

This competitor analysis takes data like engagement metrics, posting frequency, campaign effectiveness, content performance, and audience growth to help guide and optimize your Instagram strategies.

Why should brands regularly run an Instagram competitor analysis?

Contrary to popular belief, competitor analysis isn’t just about scrutinizing your rivals. It’s about gaining a deeper understanding of your target audience and uncovering insights that guide your next strategic moves on Instagram.

Here are five key benefits.

• Spotting market trends early. Have your competitors started focusing more on carousels? Is this a sign that Reels as a format is getting low engagement? By seeing what your competitors are doing—the formats they are using, the pillars they are targeting, and the hashtags they are capitalizing on, you can identify patterns and shifts in consumer behavior early.

• Benchmarking performance. You can clearly understand how your Instagram metrics like engagement rate, follower growth, and content reach stack up against others in your niche. It highlights where you’re performing well and where there is room for improvement.

• Understanding audience preferences. How is your competitor attracting the target audience? Which type of posts, formats, and messaging resonate with the audience? Think of how you can implement these findings in your content strategy.

• Identifying gaps and opportunities. This analysis can reveal blind spots like underused content types or overlooked audience segments. You can position your brand to fill those gaps and stand out. It can even show where to innovate or offer something unique that separates you.

• Getting content inspiration. By seeing what’s working (or not) for others, you can find inspiration for your posts. It’s like having a sneak peek at what your audience already loves so that you can create with more confidence and less guesswork.

How to run a competitor analysis for Instagram

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to run an effective Instagram competitor analysis for your brand.

#1. Identify your competitors

Begin by identifying the competitors you want to run an analysis on. These could be:

Direct vs. indirect competitors

Direct competitors are businesses that offer the same or similar type of product/service as yours. Indirect competitors provide different products/services but satisfy the same customer needs.

Industry leaders vs. emerging players

Industry leaders are prominent names, whereas emerging players are new or growing companies that are becoming popular and might become a key direct or indirect competitor.

You might already have a few names you want to target. If you don’t, use one or a combination of all these methods.

• Enter keywords related to your niche or industry on Instagram. Switch to the “Accounts” tab and look at the brands popping up on top.

• Search for trending hashtags in your industry and examine the top posts. Many of them might come from your competitors.

• Find suggested accounts on similar profiles. Explore these recommendations to find potential competitors.

Choose the brands that closely align with your target audience. An ideal list should consist of 3-5 competitors so you can examine all these names in depth.

#2. Set clear objectives for your analysis

What are you aiming to achieve from this competitor analysis? This will guide you on the social media metrics you track, the content you survey, and the insights you prioritize.

Here’s a list of objectives brands generally have for their competitor analysis.

• Identify top-performing content formats and themes.
• Understand what drives engagement in your niche.
• Benchmark follower growth and engagement rates.
• Discover posting frequency and timing patterns.
• Spot emerging Instagram trends before they go mainstream.
• Uncover content gaps and opportunities to stand out.
• Evaluate competitor brand voice and visual identity.
• Track hashtag and keyword strategies.
• Gain insight into audience preferences and behavior.
• Inform your own content strategy and campaign planning.

#3. Establish the relevant KPIs for your business

Based on your goals, you’ll know the metrics your analysis must focus on. Create a list of it and share it with your team. Let them add/modify the metrics in consideration.

Here are some key metrics we often include in our competitor analysis.

Reach and impressions

Ever wondered how well your competitors are really doing on Instagram? Two key metrics to check are reach and impressions.

Reach shows how many unique users saw a post, while impressions count how often the post was viewed, sometimes more than once by the same person.

Analyzing competitors’ Instagram for this metric helps you understand what content gets the most attention.

Using Socialinsider, you can get this metric for individual posts as well as all the posts in a specific time period.

By comparing this trend, you can spot what works, what doesn’t, and where your brand is outperforming them.

Engagement rate

On Instagram, engagement rate measures how much people interact with a post through likes, comments, shares, and saves, compared to how many saw it. It shows how interested the audience really is.

For competitor analysis, this metric is gold. A competitor might have thousands of followers, but if their engagement rate is low, their audience isn’t truly connected.

Comments

Comments are the true goldmine of engagement. They reflect that people care about a post enough to respond, ask questions, or share opinions. When analyzing competitors, looking at their comments helps you see what content connects on a deeper level.

In Socialinsider, you can even see the average number of comments a competitor gets on each post. Compare this number to yours. If your numbers fall short, it might be time to spice things up. Try asking more questions in captions, start conversations, or add playful, relatable content your audience can’t resist replying to.

Follower growth rate

Is your competitor gaining followers faster than you? That’s where follower growth rate comes in. It shows how quickly an account is growing over time, not just how many followers it has. This metric helps you spot trends and understand what’s working for others.

For example, if a competitor suddenly sees a spike in followers after a giveaway or reel series, that’s a clue their social media content strategy is paying off.

#4. Run a content strategy analysis

You now have some insights running through your mind. But don’t stop at just the competitor’s Instagram KPIs. Dive deep into your competitor’s overall content strategy. Here are four ways to do that.

Spy on your competitor’s content pillars

One of the most insightful competitors’ Instagram analytics data that can be gathered from their profile is content pillars. How do they distribute their content? Do they focus on educational content? Or do they equally focus on educational and entertaining content?

You can manually go through their profiles and scroll through each post to understand the different content pillars. Or you can let Socialinsider’s AI content pillars feature do the work for you.

Here’s what it looks like.

You can see the number of posts in each content pillar and their respective engagement. Based on this, you can know two things:

• What kind of content is resonating best with their target audience?
• The distribution of your competitor’s content strategy.

By conducting this for the selected competitors, you can get an idea of the perfect mix you can target for your content strategy. And if you need to introduce a content pillar that is performing well for every brand in your industry.

Analyze their posting patterns

Do you wonder if you should increase or decrease your posting frequency? You can experiment with it or look at your industry's top competitors and gauge an ideal frequency for your target audience.

You can see:

• How many posts do they share in a week?
• Are these posts heavily oriented towards Reels, carousels, standalone images, or a mix?
• Are there certain days when they tend to post more or less?
• Is there a posting time when they get the highest engagement?

We use Socialinsider to find the answers to all of these questions. All we need to do is enter our competitor’s profile and go to the Content tab.

We can see their posting frequency, ideal times, and the breakdown for each content format.

Based on this, you can try experimenting with different times if you are seeing a dip in engagement with your posting times.

Take a peek at their best-performing posts

Looking at your competitor’s best-performing Instagram posts is like finding a shortcut to what works. It reveals the content styles, formats, and topics that resonate with your shared audience. Instead of guessing what might work, you can learn directly from their wins.

Here’s how you can check your competitor's top posts on Socialinsider. You can even see the metrics each post generated.

For example, from the image above, we can see that Doritos' top posts include mostly Reels.

And luckily, Socialinsider has a dedicated tab for Reels performance analysis. Here you can see the reach and impressions of your competitor’s Reels. The graph shows the trend over time so you can see whether their Reels are gaining more visibility or losing traction. This helps you spot what kind of short-form content is catching attention.

For example, if impressions stay high but reach doesn’t grow, it might mean people are rewatching, but it’s not attracting new viewers.

Next, look at the engagement for Reels and its distribution over time.

Analyze specific campaign performance

Have your competitors run any specific campaigns? Giveaways, contests, or product releases? Learn what worked for them and what didn’t.

For example, what kind of engagement did their product launch campaign get? Did it result in an uptick of followers? What was their engagement after this campaign? This gives you insights into how to shape your campaigns moving forward.

When analyzing campaigns, pay attention to:

• The type of content they posted (reels, stories, posts)
• The messaging and visuals used
• How long the campaign lasted
• The audience response (comments, shares, saves)
• Any noticeable shifts in their metrics (reach, engagement, follower growth)

You can easily search for this campaign content on Socialinsider. Just type the hashtag or the campaign name in the search bar, and you’ll see campaign-related posts and their metrics.

#5. Look at your competitor’s engagement strategies

How are your competitors engaging with their audience? Here are five things you can watch out for.

• How do they respond to comments? Do they reply to just questions or every comment on their posts? Do they take a playful tone with their comments? Their tone will tell a lot about their brand voice and mindset.

• How do they deal with complaints? Check their mentions on platforms like X. You might see some posts about complaints or customer issues. See how they respond to those. Do they direct them to the customer service team or try to solve them online?

• How fast do they respond? Speed matters. Are they responding within minutes, a few hours, or not at all? Quick replies often build trust and boost engagement.

• Are they doing outbound engagement? Are they actively commenting on other accounts’ posts, engaging with their followers' content, or initiating conversations beyond their own feed? Based on the insights you get from all your competitors, you can revamp or make minor changes to your engaging strategies.

• What browser are you using for research? Consider using Firefox's privacy-focused browser to explore competitors' engagement patterns without leaving digital footprints that might alert them to your research activities. Remember to regularly clean up your browsing history to further protect your anonymity and remove any traces of your research.

#6. Benchmark performance to understand the bigger picture

At the end of the day, all your management wants to know is — “How many leads/revenue are we generating from social media?” or “How are we faring against our competitors?”

This calls for benchmarking. Measure social media performance against the 4-5 competitors you selected for this analysis.

Benchmarking helps you set realistic goals, track your progress consistently, and show management a true "before vs. after" story with numbers. It also keeps your social media strategy focused on improvement.

To make this process easier, we use Socialinsider's benchmarking feature. Add 4-5 competitor profiles to a project and click the “Benchmarks” tool on the left menu.

You will get an automated key insights summary suggesting what you can do next and a graphical representation of your competitor’s Instagram performance data on metrics like engagement, followers, posting frequencies, and content pillar engagement.

Take this analysis to identify strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you find that your carousel posts have higher engagement than your competitors' Reels, you might double down on that format while gradually experimenting with short videos.

To go deeper, extend your benchmark research to an industry-level analysis. To do so, go to your profile on Socialinsider and then head to the industry section. Fill out the industry details and get comparison data.

How to use AI to get qualitative competitor data

What if you could get competitor Instagram analysis by just asking the right questions? AI in social media has become powerful enough to do that. Two ways we use it to analyze the competitor’s Instagram performance:

• Utilize AI social listening tools. Use tools like Mention to see your competitor's overall brand perception. See what the audience is talking about them on social platforms. Pay attention to the gaps you can capitalize on.
• Use Socialinsider’s Strategy Assistant. Our team has created an assistant that can help answer strategic questions for social media based on our original data reports, case studies, and information available in the public domain.

You can use it to ask questions like:

What are some emerging trends in your industry? For example, here’s the response I got for the beauty industry.

What are some content gaps in your competitor’s Instagram content strategy? Here’s the response for a beauty brand’s content gaps.

What are some opportunities that my brand is missing out on?

While these are some basic questions, you can even ask our assistant about influencer collaborations that work well for your competitors, common mistakes brands are making in your niche, underserved audience segments, etc.

How to use the insights gathered from the analysis to improve your strategy

Once you’ve gathered valuable insights from your competitor and industry analysis, the real work begins — turning those insights into actionable improvements for your social media strategy. Here are four ways you can do that besides the strategies we discussed.

• Adapt successful competitor tactics, with an original twist. Identify content formats, trends, or engagement tactics (such as challenges, memes, giveaways, or collaborations) that are performing well for competitors, especially ones you haven’t yet explored. Adapt and personalize them to fit your brand voice and audience.

• A/B test competitors’ content themes. If competitors are succeeding with certain types of posts (like tutorials, humor, or behind-the-scenes content), create similar variations and run A/B tests. Measure which version resonates most with your audience to refine your content strategy.

• Use insights to inform your paid media strategy. Notice what types of organic content competitors boost with ads (you can often spot this through engagement spikes or ad libraries). This can inform which posts or offers you should prioritize for paid promotion.

• Make plans for shifts in audience sentiment. If you notice competitors suddenly getting different types of comments (more complaints, questions, or excitement), it could signal a shift in audience expectations or interests. Use this early warning to adjust your content or messaging proactively.

3 top Instagram competitor analysis tools

You can use these three competitive analysis tools to make research easy and quick.

Socialinsider — for performance benchmarking

Socialinsider lets you conduct competitor research from multiple angles and metrics without having to check each competitor’s Instagram profile manually.

Some of the key features include tracking engagement rates, follower growth, content performance analysis, and post frequency across multiple accounts. You can even benchmark your brand’s performance against competitors and understand how to optimize your performance.

Plus, you can take advantage of the automated Instagram performance reports, giving the management a full 360° view of your competitor’s strategies.

Mentionlytics — for social listening

Mentionlytics is a powerful social listening tool that complements your Instagram competitor research by helping you monitor what people are saying about your competitors — not just what they’re posting.

It tracks mentions, tags, and hashtags across Instagram and other platforms, giving you a deeper understanding of brand perception and audience sentiment.

You can use it to:

• Uncover common complaints or praise about your competitors.
• Track branded and unbranded mentions to see how often they’re talked about.
• Identify influencers or customers engaging with them.
• Spot emerging trends or crises before they peak.

SparkToro — for identifying competitor audience behavior and key influencers

SparkToro is a powerful tool for uncovering the behaviors, interests, and online habits of your competitors’ audiences.

Instead of focusing only on who follows a brand on Instagram, SparkToro helps you understand what else those people pay attention to, including which websites they visit, podcasts they listen to, and social accounts they frequently engage with.

This lets you gain insight into the broader ecosystem surrounding your competitor’s followers. You can also identify key influencers who already have credibility and influence within that audience.

Final thoughts

Instagram competitive analysis can provide many insights into what you can change with your strategies and content. Remember, the goal isn’t to copy but to compete better.

Start small. Pick a few competitors. And run their profiles on analytics tools like Socialinsider. Then take action — test new content, adjust your strategy, and keep refining. Ready to start? Activate a free trial of Socialinsider to get all competitive insights in one place.