How to research competitors on Instagram
Everybody promotes their business on Instagram. With over 200 million active Instagram business accounts, the competition is fierce. Many brands have adapted the social approach to selling and are highly dependent on Instagram promotion.
Following your own gram strategy is crucial. But no one said you’re not allowed to take a peek at the competitors from time to time.
In this article, you’ll find a helpful guide on how brands can monitor their competitors’ activity on social media and use the gathered insights to inspire their own social media campaigns and strategy.
Why should brands analyze competitors on Instagram?
In the SMB segment, chances are you are a social media team of one or a part of a small SoMe team in charge of the strategy and growth, not only the execution. The expectations are high, and the results need to be impeccable.
Here are a few things that researching your competitors on Instagram can help you do:
- establishing your own KPIs,
- learning from their mistakes,
- drawing ideas for your own content creation,
- checking who is interacting with their brand the most,
- finding out what is the most common complaint that clients have,
- researching partners and influencers who promote the brand, and
- observing trends and changes in your niche.
Examples:
With all this data, your brand can improve the messaging, for example, by using certain words on landing pages or in ads on social media. You can target people who complain about your competitor’s offer and present a better solution (yours).
By contacting the popular and involved influencers first, you can scoop a good part of market share and new audience attention. Or, quite the opposite: you will know who already worked with competitors. Therefore your team will find someone else: no influencer who respects their audience will promote competitors. You will save time by not contacting a solid “no” person.
What metrics and details should you focus on?
Of course, the metrics can vary from one company to another. Also, if your competitors are companies of a different size than yours (bigger or smaller), the metrics will vary as well. Nevertheless, there are universal KPIs and metrics that are always a good start.
What are they?
- how often do your competitors post,
- what types of content they post,
- do they establish post series or thematic approach,
- what kind of data do they use: owned or curated,
- what engagement scope do they generate,
- which types of content perform better than others, and
- how often do they offer discounts or promote sales.
Examples:
Equipped with this type of information, you can, for example, check if people in your competitor’s audience tend to engage more with certain types of content. Then, after analyzing your own strategy, you can assess if it is worth trying out to add more visuals or podcasts instead of producing the same topic as blog posts.
The research of competitors on Instagram can also reveal that you are doing better than others, so perhaps only little tweaks are required to stay on course.
How to research competitors on Instagram?
There are a few very easy tactics to use. No need to spend a lot of time and budget to get to know the basics about your competitors. You can try these tested techniques:
Snoop around as a private user
It is so easy to spot competitors signing up to get newsletters or updates on social media. Some companies will even block certain domain names to avoid competitors spying on them. Usually, it is fairly easy, though.
- Pay attention to the visuals and content types.
- Check out the blog.
- See which outside articles they share to assess link-building activities.
- Get a free account on Moz.com, where you’ll check out specific domains and their backlinks.
- Signup for the newsletter and see how the promotion is structured.
- See stories and posts anonymously (and totally legit) by using InFlact or a similar service.
- Run a free domain SEO report in Ubersuggest.
- Reply to stories and posts, and see if the brand responds back or if they just neglect this part of the conversation.
This all can be done in a day or two. Then you just need to sit down, analyze it and make a list of key learnings. Use them to improve your communication and deliver better results for Instagram and other platforms.
Search key metrics with the social media analytics tool
There are many social media platforms out there, and each of them will have a feature offering free reports for your social media account. Getting your data is easy. How to research competitors’ Instagram and other social media accounts? By using social media analytics tools, such as NapoleonCat, for example.
What type of data will you get once signing up for such a service?
- engagement rate,
- engagement by post type,
- best posting times for engagement,
- Instagram followers count history,
- best performing content, and
- social media mentions from every corner of the web, like groups or open profiles of other users.
Do you know what the best part is?
You will get your data and data from competitors for an easy and straightforward comparison of a few competitive brands. All done with a few clicks.
No time-consuming all-day manual research of each and every competitor. Just add any public profile handles, and the system gets it done for you by gathering data via API. You just sit and enjoy a few cat memes while sipping coffee or chatting with coworkers.
In summary
Researching competitors on Instagram is a fairly easy and cost-effective way to compare marketing efforts with other players in your niche.
By checking how you compare to others, it’s easier to tweak the social media strategy and start interacting with the most active followers of other brands.
