What is Instagram Competitor Analysis?
Instagram Competitor Analysis
Competitive analysis is the process of researching and evaluating competitors’ strengths and weaknesses in comparison to your own. Typically, this requires analyzing all the ins and outs of your competitors’ business. Including company overview, go-to-market strategy, pricing strategy, etc.
Instagram competitor analysis is not that complicated. All you have to do is figure out your competitors’ audience engagement, marketing content performance, and hashtag strategy.
Why is it important to research your Instagram competitors?
Finding out who your Instagram competitors are is an essential tactic to determine what kind of threat they present to your financial well-being.
The first step in order to create a killer competitive analysis on Instagram (or any other marketing social media platform) is to establish who are your competitors.
There are three types of competitors:
- Direct – Businesses that sell the same types of goods and services you do to the same market.
- Indirect – Businesses that sell substitute products, services, or items that can be used in place of yours.
- Potential new entrants – Although you can’t predict the future, any news you’ve picked up about new businesses entering your market should be considered as you analyze your current and future Instagram competition.
Advantages of doing a social media competitive analysis on Instagram
Clarity
Trying to understand your audience is the shorter definition of the term “clarity.” Knowing what content your target audience likes to engage with and consume is essential to every Instagram marketing strategy.
See where your audience hangs out
Does your audience spend more time watching Reels, or maybe on Instagram stories? Thus, knowing where users spend the most watch time gives you an upper hand over your Instagram rivals.
Find new opportunities
While you do Instagram competitive analysis, keep an open eye for gaps in your rivals’ content.
What do I mean by gaps? Maybe your Instagram competitors’ digital content is a little bit dry. Or, they do not respond to comments. Or they post too rarely.
You can also find different angles of the same story or put your own digital experience behind it.
Craft better Instagram content
As you gain essential knowledge about what your Instagram competitors are posting and being mindful about your own content, you can find a common ground between the two and overpower your current Instagram content strategy.
Creativity comes while you are getting inspired by other big players from your niche.
How to analyze competitors on Instagram?
You need to distinguish several opponents first
Doing it without any tools, you will have to find the pages of the most influencing companies in your branch. However, such an approach requires more time for the completion of the task and more efforts to be applied.
There are different useful free and premium tools that can help you to do it faster and in a more effective manner. By using those applications you can quickly find your competitors, receive the most updated data about their campaigns.
The next important aspect is posting time
By researching your opponents you can easily find out the best days and hours to issue your posts.
It is not easy to do it on your own. You can spend several weeks and months trying to find out how many posts per week are better for your TA. By looking at engagement rates, you will be able to find the most effective number of per week posts.
In fact, analyzing competitors will allow you to find out some useful digital metrics including:
- Engagement valuation over time.
- Estimation of each type of content (media, text, etc).
- The total volume of interactions on each type of content
Finally, you need to gather information about hashtags
Those are different and divided into two main groups. Branded and community hashtags. By browsing your competitors’ pages, you can easily find the hashtags they use to promote their brands. The right combination of those “keywords” will help you to significantly increase your brand awareness.