Instagram remains a popular platform for brands to market, with more than one billion users actively engaging on the site. About 83% of consumers use the site to discover new products and services, and brands display advertisements to over 850 million users. As a result, businesses have resorted to marketing their services on this platform.
Unfortunately, growing brand awareness and engagement levels for businesses has resulted in the market becoming one of the most highly competitive markets there is.
To differentiate yourself from others in this market, regularly conducting an Instagram competitor analysis will give you insights on how you, as well as your competitors, are performing. The findings will help understand the strengths and weaknesses of brands with regard to social media marketing.
What is Instagram competitor analysis?
Instagram competitor analysis involves detailed examination of content strategies employed by competing businesses seeking similar audiences. To conduct this analysis, you will need to look into:
- Content Strategies: What type of content is being shared by your competitors, their themes, visual imagery, as well as captioning styles? Check how promotional, educational, and entertaining content is customer balanced and merged.
- Evaluating Engagement Metrics: Study how competitors engage with their audience via likes, comments, shares, and even direct messages. What types of posts get the most engagement and which ones do not? Please explore the reasons why.
- Evaluating Performance Metrics: Monitor relevant metrics like follower counts, engagement rates, average posts per week, and effectiveness of hashtags. The average statistics for these data points can be used as a baseline to gauge your performance against.
- Evaluating Brand Strategies: Look at the competitors’ bios and overall branding to understand their target audience, how they are marketing their brand, and how successful they are doing with the marketing.
A thorough analysis of these components allows companies to develop competitive Instagram marketing strategies, find gaps for differentiation, and position the brand for sustainable growth within the clashing markets.
What Are the Benefits of Conducting a Competitor Analysis on Instagram?
Gaining insights into the industry and refining the social media strategy are the primary goals of conducting a competitor analysis on Instagram. Knowing who your competitors are and what they are doing helps establish and identify clear gaps that can be improved upon. This narrows the focus onto what will give your company a competitive advantage. Thus aligning and integrating the brand’s marketing efforts with the audience and industry insight.
5 Tools to Analyze Instagram Competitors
1. Hootsuite
Along with managing social media, Hootsuite is a great Instagram competitor analysis tool. It has a nice interface and provides detailed information on the performance of posts, followers gained, and even engagement rates to help you understand your Instagram strategy better.
Hootsuite’s distinguishing feature is that it allows you to measure how well you are doing in comparison with your rivals, which aids in recognizing which areas you need to work on.
Hootsuite merges with other social media channels, which is great as it offers a comprehensive view of your social media. Another wonderful feature is the detailed analytics on hashtags, which allows businesses to improve their hashtag strategies.
2. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is great for all things social media, not just Instagram. However, it does excel when it comes to spying on Instagram competitors. In fact, Sprout Social allows one to analyze a whole list of competitors at the same time, which is incredibly useful.
The program also has social media monitoring functions that allow you to track what is being said about you and your competitors online. In this regard, there is an attitude monitoring function to track how the public feels towards your competition.
Sprout Social may not offer sophisticated Instagram analytics tools, but it is a suitable option when it comes to managing social media marketing requirements in general.
3. Skedsocial
Sked Social offers advanced tools for Instagram competitor analysis to help businesses and marketers are provided with the necessary statistics to effectively maximize their social media campaigns. As one of the leading analytics Sked Social is famous for, users can track pets engagement stats with up to five competitor accounts as well as their follower increases, posting habits, and hashtag usage.
Reports about the effectiveness of the rivals’ content help brands discover new trends and ways to improve. This platform is very helpful when testing your account strategy versus the market’s average performance. After examining the contest’s greatest posts and how much praise the audience gives to the posts, with Sked Social, you can alter how you create your content and increase the chances of having a greater impact.
Moreover, her analytics also cover Instagram Reels, Stories, and other campaigns, making it easier to understand the strategic approach of the competitors. Sked Social is the perfect tool for small business owners, agencies, or even solo entrepreneurs and creators who are looking to grow their presence on Instagram.
4. Keyhole
With Keyhole, a social media management tool, you can track everything your competitor brands are doing on Instagram and other social media platforms.
You are surely familiar with how side-by-side comparison reports simplify competitor analysis. You can also monitor post impressions, audience demographics, and share of voice. How is that possible? Keyhole provides you with actionable performance insights in the form of graphs and charts detailing your competitors’ metrics and performance within the industry.
5. Social Blade
Furthermore, Social Blade would be great for Instagram competitor analysis as it tracks many social media platforms. It tracks the most important statistics of an Instagram account, such as follower count, engagement rates, and posting intervals. This feature allows businesses to compare their statistics with competitors. Searching for profiles of competitors is easy on the tool, and its dashboards make the insights visually appealing as they are represented through graphs and charts.
Marketers can understand the growth pattern of competitor accounts with the help of engagement and content performance analytics and their unique features like future projections and estimated earnings. Social Blade’s customizability is appealing to small businesses and content creators hoping to improve their Instagram pages. Its being offered at a low price, starting at $3.99 per month, helps increase its accessibility.
For competing brands or social media influencers, Social Blade is a great tool that tracks statistics and provides real-time insights and important information necessary to adjust an existing social media strategy.
How to Analyze Your Instagram Competition Manually Without Tools
Competitor analysis can be more efficient with the right tools, but manually studying competitors’ social media will give you valuable insights. Here’s how to manually analyze Instagram competition:
- Inspect competitor accounts: Go to their posts and scroll through their stories and highlights to identify common and recurring themes.
- Check hashtag usage: Check the hashtags they use often and assess how relevant and popular those words are.
- Examine engagement metrics: Check the comment and like ratios to their content alongside the share count to determine which posts perform best.
- Track Stories and Reels: Monitor their content to see how they capture audience attention in the moment.
Most effective strategies for Competitive Instagram Analysis
Instagram’s stories, which one of your competitors might have, make it more engaging compared to other platforms. However, keep in mind that competitor analysis is not spontaneous; rather, it has to be planned. Below is a list that will guide you on how to conduct analysis and make the best out of it:
- Set Targets and Goals: Decide the specific areas of your competitor analysis that you want to focus on, whether that be increasing engagement, follower count, or defining your overall content strategy.
- Identify the Target Audience: Knowing who your audience is and understanding their preferences will be helpful in creating specific content suited to their needs.
- Look at what your competition is posting and the audience engagement: Please analyze the types of content that your competition is posting. Furthermore, check how their audience engages with the content. These findings can help you to know what works.
- Research the tools and Harves Metrics: Instagram offers a competitor analysis tool that will analyze and track content as well as measure performance. Put it to good use, because it will save you time and give you the insights you are looking for.
- Focus on Trend Watching: Always make sure that you are following and observing what is popular or what is changing in your niche. You would rather not follow the trends; you want to be the first to set them and outperform the competition.
- After analyzing, execute these actions: Apply the insights made from your analysis to your Instagram marketing strategy. This modification may assist you in producing better content and performing more efficiently.
When handled properly, these practices can help you perform a detailed analysis of other companies and improve your Instagram account.
Things to be cautious of when doing Instagram competitor analysis:
While conducting an Instagram competitor analysis, there are some traps that you should be aware of so that you do not spend resources while not getting any results. Here are some mistakes to avoid:
- Failing to set quantifiable goals: Without identifiable goals, your analysis may not have any direction. Establish what you wish to accomplish in the beginning.
- Disregarding your target audience: Lack of knowledge about what your audience is looking for can lead to useless insights. Always consider the audience.
- Giving too much weight to vanity metrics: Followers and likes are some of the most misplaced metrics in the social media space. Evaluate engagement among other important metrics.
- Forgetting about content and interaction: Merely looking at the numbers will not help you. Examine the kind of content published and the interaction it garners.
- Failing to utilize the right tools and measures: Not using the right tools can make your analysis less effective. Purchase good competitor analysis tools to ensure that you receive the data needed.
Avoiding the above-listed errors guarantees that your Instagram competitor analysis will be effective and useful for your social media strategy.
Conclusion
Analytical tools for Instagram competitors’ profiles are essential in devising a workable social media campaign. These tools offer valuable intelligence on the content strategies, engagement measures, and other captivating practices of your rivals. By analyzing these factors, a business stands the chance to improve its strategy and remain relevant in social media competition.
Besides monitoring competitors, the social media tool enables one to benchmark their performance against other users and provides useful recommendations. These enable users to achieve their objectives for content enhancement, increase user engagement, or assess possible developing trend markets.
While choosing an Instagram competitor analysis tool, consider the accessibility of the technology, its sophistication and depth of coverage, as well as your objectives. Access to accurate information enables the brand to control its Instagram marketing strategies and attain desired outcomes.
