If you want to improve the quality of your Instagram marketing, you need to analyze your competitors’ accounts – it’s as simple as that. Not only will it provide you with great insights on what and when to post, but also which type of content performs best amongst your target audience.
Analyzing other brands on Instagram will help you fine-tune your social media strategy and stay on top of the game. And believe me, it is worth the effort – brands experience 10x higher engagement1 on Instagram than they do on Facebook.
In this article, you’ll find out:
- why you should analyze your competitors on Instagram,
- what’s the best Instagram competitor analysis tool,
- what exact insights you will gain from an Instagram competitor analysis,
- and how to generate an Instagram competitor report in seconds.
Instagram competitor analysis – why you should do it
Before we get into the how, let’s first discuss the why. There are quite a few strong reasons2 as to why you most definitely should monitor your competitors’ Instagram accounts, so let’s break it all down.
Instagram competitive analysis helps you establish your own KPIs
By analyzing your competitors’ Instagram activity, you put things in perspective – you find out how well your content is doing in comparison to similar brands. Benchmarking your business against a successful company of comparable size and resources will help you set your own business goals on Instagram.
This process of social media benchmarking is crucial in deciding which key performance indicators you wish to pursue. Say you need to know how many posts a week you should publish – just take a look at how often your competitors publish content on Instagram and draw conclusions.
Instagram competitor analysis gives you ideas for content creation
It’s really difficult to stand out with your content on Instagram to promote your product or service. It seems like everything is already there and every brand has squeezed the platform dry. Well, that’s not entirely true. While the social network is indeed oversaturated, a solid strategy still works there. The key is figuring out what kind of content your target audience holds most valuable.
Sure, you can figure it out on your own, but this may turn into a trial and error nightmare consuming countless of your precious hours. Instead, check what kind of content works best for your competitors. If you notice anything peculiar, don’t copy it – take notes and try to apply similar techniques to your own top-notch Instagram content strategy.
Analyzing competitors’ Instagram accounts is simply cost-effective
Competitive analysis can be a hard task, which is exactly why it’s often outsourced to external agencies for a lofty price. But whether you run a B2B eCommerce store or any other kind of business, you can try and do it yourself. Now, doing it manually could take you days or even weeks.
However, there are some magical social media analytics tools that can do all of the dirty work for you – one of them being our very own NapoleonCat.
Instagram Competitor Analysis Tool
Track your competitors on Instagram. Compare multiple Instagram accounts side by side and generate in-depth reports within seconds. Try NapoleonCat for free:
Try NapoleonCat free for 14 days. No credit card required.
How to analyze competitors on Instagram
With Instagram competitor analysis tools such as NapoleonCat, you can conduct real-time benchmarking within seconds.
You can analyze other Instagram accounts – create competitor sets, compare multiple Instagram accounts side by side, and extract all the data that you need in the form of charts, tables, or full performance reports.
Furthermore, you can view results for different time periods – days, weeks, months, or even set up completely custom time ranges.
The example below shows a quick summary of the Instagram activity of 4 popular automotive brands. Using comparative sets, you can quickly notice which brands made progress compared to the previous period.
You can download specific sets of data (graphs, tables) in an excel sheet, a PNG file, or you can generate a full Instagram report.
Reminder: After you connect your Instagram accounts to NapoleonCat, please wait up to 24 hours for the tool to fully sync your Instagram analytics data.
What content works best on Instagram?
As I mentioned before, you can explore the realm of content creation all on your own, but that comes with a price. It’s risky and time-consuming – the trial and error method can go both ways.
In order to get an idea of what content you should create and what resonates with your target audience, you can simply take a look at what your competitors are doing.
With NapoleonCat, you can quickly notice which of your competitors’ posts generate the highest engagement rate and how they are received in general.
This overview will also help you establish a general theme for your content and decide on the kind of messages you’d like to communicate in your captions.
How to find the best times to post on Instagram
You should try to maximize your organic reach – but how, exactly, can you do that? Well, one crucial factor here is time.
You need to find which days and hours tend to generate the highest reach and engagement rate from your target audience.
And since you and your competitors share the same – or very similar – target groups, you can easily extract this kind of data with NapoleonCat. This way you can maximize your brand’s social networking potential.
We can observe that Wednesdays seem like pretty good days to post content. However, given that, in general, you should post content every day3, you can simply save Wednesdays for more important and more valuable posts.
You can also check post engagement broken down by hours to find out at what exact times during the day your audience is the most active:
Pro-tip* Don’t get lost in time zones. In the table above we’re set to Europe/London. You can easily change it in the general settings of your NapoleonCat account.
Instagram analytics for other accounts
Track your competitors on Instagram. Compare multiple Instagram accounts side by side and generate in-depth reports within seconds. Try NapoleonCat for free:
Try NapoleonCat free for 14 days. No credit card required.
How often should you post on Instagram?
How much is too much? Should you post every day, a few times a day, or only from time to time?
Again, we can easily find that out with NapoleonCat’s competitive analytics.
We can see who’s got the highest engagement rates and how often they post. As seen in a few visuals above, the data points us to the conclusion that Mercedes and BMW have substantially higher engagement rates than Honda and Audi.
And yes, the first two brands post most often – more than once a day.
By clicking on the graph, you can even see exactly how many posts your competitors publish daily.
Which Instagram hashtags should you choose?
Hashtags can boost your organic reach even 20x, or more. Choosing the most relevant hashtags that will actually work and boost your Instagram reach can be difficult, which is why NapoleonCat also offers an insight into which hashtags your competitors are using.
We can see that our automotive companies mostly use branded hashtags and those hashtags generate the highest Instagram engagement.
Create Instagram competitor reports in seconds
You can call it a bonus, a big bonus.
To further improve your social media game, NapoleonCat also allows you to generate detailed Instagram competitor reports. The reports include even more in-depth information than you can see inside the Analytics feature.
It takes just a few seconds to create a report, and then you wait around a minute for the report to be generated and ready to download.
Now imagine doing it all by hand – that would be mission impossible.
I even took some time to show you how to generate such a report and how it looks like (to get a full view, make sure the video is set to 1080p and is playing in full-screen mode). Playing a fake voice-over actor was fun 🙂
Competitive analysis on Instagram is of crucial importance when developing your social media marketing strategy. It helps you figure out the wheres, the whats, the whys, and the whens.
Conducting such analysis requires a lot of time and effort, but thankfully there are powerful tools that make life easier. Start your FREE TRIAL and see for yourself.
Instagram marketing made easier
Analytics, reporting, scheduling, and more. Try NapoleonCat and save 90% of your time spent on your marketing tasks. Try it for free:
Try NapoleonCat free for 14 days. No credit card required.
Instagram competitor analysis – FAQs
As an added bonus, we’re including some of the frequently asked questions regarding Instagram competitor analysis (and Instagram analytics in general).
How to analyze Instagram accounts
The simplest way to analyze your own Instagram account is through the free analytics tool called Instagram Insights. All you need to do to access it is switch your personal profile into a business account:
- Make sure your Instagram profile is set to public
- Go to your profile page
- Access settings by tapping on the three lines in the top right corner of the screen
- Tap on “Account” and then on “Switch to business profile.” You will be asked to connect your account with a Facebook business page. If you don’t own any FB Pages, you’ll need to set one up using your personal Facebook account. Don’t worry, you don’t have to post anything there, all it needs to do is simply exist.
The downside to Instagram Insights is that you can’t analyze any other public Instagram accounts – e.g., your competitors.
How to find your competitors on Instagram
There are different ways of finding your competitors on Instagram. The most common would be visiting their website. That’s where they should have their social media accounts linked at the bottom of the page. It usually looks somewhat like this:
Click on the Instagram icon, and you should be redirected to their IG account.
How to analyze your competitors on Instagram
Once you know who your competitors are (and their IG usernames), you can easily analyze their performance in NapoleonCat.
And since you and your competitors share the same (or a very similar) target audience, you can learn a lot from their performance – what kind of content performs best, when your target audience is the most engaged, how often you should post, and more.
Instagram Competitor Analysis Tool
Track your competitors on Instagram. Compare multiple Instagram accounts side by side and generate in-depth reports within seconds. Try NapoleonCat for free:
Try NapoleonCat free for 14 days. No credit card required.
How to check if your target audience is on Instagram
If you’re wondering whether your audience even hangs out on Instagram, you can check that using NapoleonCat’s competitive analytics.
In short, you analyze your competitors’ audience across various platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
You can track the total number of followers for each social media platform, the engagement, and the total sum of fan interactions (social footprint).
From the example above, we can see that Instagram is very popular in the beauty industry, with the biggest engagement.
How to attract your competitors’ Instagram followers
The simplest (and cheapest) way to attract your competitors’ followers on Instagram is by interacting with them. This means that you should follow them, comment on their posts, and start conversations – that’s how you can get the ball rolling.
For more Instagram tips, check out our other articles:
- How to See Instagram Likes in 2022
- How to Track Instagram Follower Growth Over Time
- Understand Instagram Analytics
- A Complete Guide to Instagram Follower Demographics
- 300+ Best Instagram Captions for 2022
- Auto-Comments on Instagram: When and How Should You Use Them?
- How I Used Hashtags to Grow my Instagram Organic Reach 20x
- How to Get More Comments on Instagram in 2022
- Social Media Competitor Analysis
