Competition on Instagram can do more good than harm for your brand if you properly conduct an Instagram competitor analysis before creating or implementing new plans or strategies. This can help you establish your place in a competitive market and stand up to your rivals.
Analyzing competitors on Instagram will help you improve user engagement with your brand by reaching out to the target audience. So let’s explore some ways and tools you can use to conduct a good competitor analysis on Instagram in 2024.
What is an Instagram Competitor Analysis?
An Instagram competitor analysis means tracking and analyzing your competitors’ activities on IG. This data includes the number of likes, followers, accounts followed, comments, and mentions your competitor gets on Instagram.
Competitive analysis is a secret marketing weapon that only a few know about. Instead of staying away from your competitors, you can learn a lot more about how to improve your social media performance by following and monitoring your competitors more closely.
Through these metrics, you get an insight into what makes a brand or product popular. Knowing this, you can create unique strategies to get ahead of your competitors and attract the right audience, although this process can be a bit complicated. With the right tips and tools, it can be made simpler.
1. Identify your Competitors
You want to identify your most relevant competitors as part of your Instagram competitive analysis. To identify these businesses, determine your target industry and niche. Then, search using relevant keywords on Instagram.
Once you have a list of your top competitors, classify them into one of these groups:
- Direct competitors: Businesses that offer similar products or services in your target market.
- Indirect competitors: Accounts that offer products or services that may be of interest to your audience or that operate within your industry, but do not compete directly with you.
You can also look for inspiring accounts or industry leaders who, while not direct competitors, offer valuable insights into content strategies and potential trends.
With these categories in mind, you can easily determine which social media accounts to prioritize when conducting your competitor analysis. This is especially helpful if you have limited resources. So you should focus first on your direct competitors, then on your indirect competitors, and finally on inspiring accounts for social media benchmarking.
2. Analyze their Profiles
The next step in your analysis is to look at your competitors’ social profiles. This will give you valuable insights into how you can differentiate yourself as a business.
As you evaluate your competitors’ profiles, pay special attention to these details:
- Bio: Do they have a clear, concise, and engaging bio that reflects their brand identity? Is there anything unique about their bio?
- Profile Aesthetics: Is your profile photo professional and consistent with your overall brand? Do they embrace a specific theme or style?
- Link in Bio – Do they have a link in their bio? Are they using it effectively to drive traffic to their site or specific landing pages?
- Keywords: What keywords are they using in their profile?
This information allows you to optimize your profile and improve your account performance. For example, if your competition comes up first when users search for your niche on Instagram, you’ll want to emulate how they structure their profile and use the keywords they use.
3. Study His Followers
Understanding your competitors’ followers helps you create detailed customer personas that accurately reflect your target audience. Plus, it can reveal gaps in your competitor’s offerings, allowing you to capitalize on these opportunities.
So take a look at your competitors’ total follower count. You’ll want to determine whether they have genuine or fake followers to ensure an accurate measurement of their Instagram account’s success. Simply review their follower list and look at each account as part of your Instagram competitive analysis. You may want to flag the following as suspicious:
- Accounts without images as profile photos
- You have few or no followers
- Accounts without posts
- Private accounts
- Accounts with made-up names, such as handles that contain many numbers
These are probably accounts purchased to make their account appear popular. If after removing these suspicious accounts your competitor is left with a short list of followers, analyze why they are performing poorly.
If, on the other hand, your competitor has a healthy list of followers, then you can conclude that your competitor’s Instagram account is doing well. You’ll want to use it as a model when crafting your Instagram strategy. In addition to their Instagram bio, you’ll want to check out their content strategy and engagement rate to improve your own strategies.
Don’t forget to determine the demographics of your legitimate Instagram followers with analytics tools. Look at their gender, age, and location. These are likely your target audience, too. With this data, you’ll be able to better understand their needs, motivations, and preferences, so you can serve them more effectively.
4. Evaluate your Content Strategy
Content is the heart and soul of any marketing strategy, whether it’s retail or SaaS. It’s essential to understand your competitors’ Instagram content strategy so you can find ways to improve yours.
Look at their main content categories (e.g. product showcases, event promotions, or customer testimonials). What types of content do they have? Is there video content, like Reels and Stories? Or is it just images? What content ideas can you generate by looking at their content?
Next, look at user engagement. Is your competitor’s content generating a lot of likes and shares? This means their Instagram content strategy is working and worth emulating.
If this is the case, take a close look at your competitors’ top-performing content. This is the type of content you’ll want to create. Also, look at the structure of their descriptions and the way they approach topics. See how they use relevant hashtags.
5. Analyze the Data
After collecting the basic metrics, you need to analyze them and find out what strategies are helping your competitors attract user engagement. Compare your profile to your competitors and notice the things that are resulting in higher engagement for both you and them.
Take note of all the things your competitors are doing that you could also do to generate high levels of user engagement and reach the right audience. Use similar hashtags and a content strategy with minor adjustments to keep your brand uniqueness intact.
Also look at the growth of your competitors and see if they have implemented anything new lately, such as following the latest trends or collaborating with influencers.
