5 Of The Best Instagram Competitor Analysis Tools

5 Of The Best Instagram Competitor Analysis Tools

August 19, 2022
By
Kyra Goodman

Instagram now has over 1 billion users worldwide, representing huge opportunities for brands wanting to reach people.

Instagram now has over 1 billion users worldwide, representing huge opportunities for brands wanting to reach people. But it also has a huge proportion of businesses on the platform, all competing for a chance to impress these users. In such a competitive landscape, it makes sense to have the best Instagram competitor analysis tools in the business. This will allow you to up your social strategy, beat the competition, and ultimately gain a bigger market share on the platform.

Of course, you want to have your own unique strategy and post distinctive content that helps you stand out from your competitors. But knowing what works (and what doesn’t) will give you a huge advantage when it comes time to plan your Instagram posts and execute a killer social strategy.

Staying ahead of your competitors involves actually knowing what competitors are up to. But you’re only going to know the top strategies and post top-performing content if you have the tools to inform you along the way. Let’s get real; you don’t want to spend hours manually trawling through your competitor’s content from the last few months when you can be creating your own!

Data is a powerful force, and that definitely applies when it comes to the world of digital marketing. That’s why we’ve put several Instagram competitor analysis tools to the test and come up with the best ones in the market. Using them will allow you to get informed, fine-tune your social strategy, and (hopefully) see results quicker than ever. So, let’s dive in!

What is a Social Media Competitive Analysis?

First up, what is a social media competitive analysis? Well, in a nutshell, a social media competitive analysis should report on and analyze all of your top competitors regularly and compare them to your brand. A competitive analysis can be as brief or as detailed as you want it to be and should include all the key metrics that you want to track.

You might want to do a detailed analysis for all competitors, or a brief analysis for your wider competitive set and a more detailed analysis for your primary competitors. You can also choose to do a one-off report, or create one every week! The choice is yours.

That said, a social media competitive analysis typically includes the following details about your competitors:

There are also plenty of other tools available to help you track your competitors’ performance within the wider online world. Other tools can help analyze your competitors’ blog content performance, their ranking for certain SEO keywords, their website performance, and even their email marketing performance.

Why Do a Social Media Competitive Analysis?

You might be wondering why it’s so important to keep an eye on your competitors. In fact, some brands tend to think it’s better to ignore their competitors completely and create their own social media content strategy.

It makes sense that some brands have this mentality. After all, the last thing you want to do is copy your competitors and regurgitate the same Instagram content as everyone else. But, with social media changing all the time, it also makes sense to keep an eye on what competitors are doing. You might even learn a thing or two!

See, the goal of a competitor analysis isn’t to research and copy other brands, it’s to learn valuable lessons about what works, or how new features can be utilized. These lessons can help you sharpen up your own strategy.

After all, your competitors’ target audiences are probably very similar to your own, so taking note of which strategies are working can be a very easy way of refining your own strategy. Think of your competitors’ social media channels as your own little research groups where you can see which ideas are resonating without having to lift a finger. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?

A social media competitive analysis can provide you with:

  • that can assist you in setting KPIs and tracking ongoing performance
  • keeping in mind that you want to tweak ideas for your specific audience
  • on the competitor brand and content ideas
  • which can help you tweak your targeting
  • which can inform your product development

The best part? Most social media competitor analysis tools are affordable and easy to access. They can also save you hours every week. Instead of painstakingly searching through competitors’ posts manually or crunching the numbers trying to analyze things like Instagram engagement rates or video views, tools allow you to export reports to get you the data straight away. Keep scrolling to score our pick of the best Instagram competitor analysis tools.

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Top Instagram Analytics Tools

There are countless Instagram competitor analysis tools out there, but not all of them are created equally. All these tools vary dramatically in terms of price and their capabilities. Some of these tools are free, whereas others require a monthly or yearly subscription fee. However, many of these tools also have other functions that can be very helpful when it comes to social media management, meaning that they can be extremely cost-effective in the long run.

Some of these tools only provide a very top-line view of competitor activity, whereas others offer an in-depth look into everything your competitors have been up to. Let’s get into it.

1.  Sked Social

Sked Social is an all-in-one social media management tool, offering everything from in-depth competitor analysis to scheduling, file storage, and opportunities to collaborate with your team on content creation and amendments.

The great thing about this tool is that it really offers beginning-to-end social media management. Instead of having five different tools for different social media tasks, you can simply use one tool, all wrapped up in one cost.

This social media analysis tool offers in-depth insights on your page performance, allowing you to easily track metrics like engagement rates, posting frequency, share of voice, post performance, audience stats, and other key metrics.

When it comes to competitive analysis, Sked Social has several features that can provide in-depth insights into what your competitors have been up to on social media. This includes:

Best of all, Sked allows you to directly compare your brand’s performance to your competitors in an easy-to-read format. What could be better?

2.  Phlanx

If you want detailed analytics on your competitors or even on specific influencers, Phlanx is the perfect tool to use. It measures Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, making it ideal if you’re running an influencer campaign and need to analyze prospective influencers and their audience demographics.

It’s ideal for grabbing at-a-glance stats and seeing who makes up your competitor’s target audiences. It shows you where your competitors’ followers are based, their gender, and even how many of their audiences are classified as “influencers”.

You can use Phlanx for free if you’re doing a one-off analysis. Or, if you want to keep a close eye on how your competitors are growing over time, you can subscribe for a fee on an ongoing basis.

3.  Social Blade

Social Blade is similar to Phlanx in that it can provide top-line information about your competitors quickly in an easy-to-read format. It analyzes data from more platforms though, analyzing Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, Trovo, Mixer, DLive, and Dailymotion.

It offers users a free account, allowing you to quickly analyze other brands or influencers at the click of a button, but it also offers a paid component with slightly more in-depth stats. In terms of Instagram specifically, it can show you the overall ranking of specific Instagram accounts, as well as provide data on their followers and how they have changed over time.

While it shows how many posts a brand is posting, it doesn’t have in-depth details on post-performance. Its Instagram analytics data probably isn’t as in-depth as some of the other platforms mentioned, but if you’re looking for a free platform that provides some overview data, or you need to analyze the data for a few different social media platforms, this is a great place to start.

4.  Buzz Sumo

If blog content is a large component of your content marketing strategy, Buzz Sumo is a great tool for you. This tool can help you measure content performance, track trending content, track the competitive landscape, and identify influencers. It can even feed into your SEO strategy.

Even if you’re considering starting a blog content strategy or upgrading your website, Buzz Sumo can help you to see how your competitors are doing and can help you set benchmarks when it comes to content performance. You can use it to map out your competitors’ content strategies and better structure your own.

In terms of social media, it can help you identify the best-performing competitors and influencers in your space and find brand advocates who are sharing your content (or your competitor’s content!), which can help shape influencer marketing strategies, too.

Much of these features are available on Twitter, but Instagram’s API makes it a little more difficult to track in such detail. Yet, if the competitors and influencers you’re tracking are active on both platforms, this can still be a helpful tool.

Buzz Sumo certainly doesn’t come cheap, but if budget isn’t an issue and you’re serious about upscaling your content marketing strategy, it can be a key tool for your brand.

5.  Brand 24

If you’re running a large marketing campaign, have a large (and loud) social media following, or are running PR activity that you need to track, Brand 24 is a great social media monitoring tool for the job.

This all-encompassing listening tool lets you easily track brand mentions and brand sentiment in real-time, allowing you to manage any negative brand mentions before they get out of hand.

A social listening tool allows you to do just that: listen. It helps you track all the mentions of your brand or your competitors’ brands in the social media landscape and the wider online world. You can also easily track and filter competitor mentions, narrowing them down to track specific their products or marketing campaigns across social media channels and the wider online space.

Their competitor analysis feature lets you track your competitor’s social media channels and even track specific marketing campaigns. It also has a comparison tool that allows you to compare your own results directly with other competitors.

How to Choose The Right Instagram Competitor Analysis Tool

Choosing the right Instagram competitor analysis tool can be tricky, but most services – like Sked Social, for example – allow you to sign up for a free trial and test out the different features to determine the best tool for you and your team.

There are several considerations to take into place when choosing the right tool, such as:

  • Do you need a tool that will just allow you to create regular competitor analysis reports, or do you need a more comprehensive tool that will help you with other aspects of social media management? Ideally, it’s better to have just one tool instead of four different tools. Not only is it typically cheaper to do things this way, but it also means that your team only needs to learn how to use one tool and can collaborate much more easily using that tool.
  • Think about your social media strategy and the marketing campaigns you’ve got coming up. If you’re simply starting with a trial influencer marketing campaign and you need some extra intel, you might just want to use a free tool in a one-off capacity. On the other hand, if you really want to upscale your long-term social media strategy, you might want to think about a platform that can be used in an ongoing capacity. Sked Social, for example, offers many other features besides reporting and advanced analytics. It also helps you to store files, schedule posts, collaborate, and track comments and post performance.
  • . Most of these tools come at a reasonable price, but the one you ultimately choose will depend on how important your Instagram strategy is within your overall marketing strategy, how large your social media following is, and what you’re planning to achieve in the next 6 to 12 months. If you have a lot of work to do or some ambitious goals, you’ll need to invest in the tools that will allow you to make that happen. On the other hand, if you’re just looking for a one-off tool to check out what your competitors are doing before a specific campaign, you might be better off using some of the free tools that are already available.
  • Most social media competitor analysis tools are relatively easy to use, however, some are more compatible with other social media platforms (like Twitter) than they are with Instagram. Your chosen platform needs to be easy to use, and work well with Instagram. That said, it will depend on how many people are using the tool and how they are using it.

We recommend trialling any tools that you’re considering using, if possible, and encouraging your team to try them out, too. This will help ensure that the tool will be a worthwhile investment.

When you’re considering cost, however, be sure to think about the time it takes to perform your social media management work with and without tools.

Social media posting can take up hours out of every week, and it can be disruptive having to post at optimal times throughout the day. Scheduling is a much better option. It allows your team to optimize their time, increasing productivity throughout the day. It also ensures better post performance, as it ensures high-quality social media content is being uploaded at the best-performing time of day, with all the correct hashtags, location tags, and product tags.

Keep Up With Your Competitors With Sked Social

If you want to level up your social media game, it’s critical that you have the right tools to support your team. Advanced Instagram analytics tools can give you the extra insight you need to supercharge your strategy and streamline your processes. Only through setting up the right processes from beginning to end will you be able to streamline your work, increase efficiency and maximize your bottom-line profits.

With so many tools out there, it can be difficult to know which are the best for you and your team. Ideally, you want an intuitive social media management tool that can work seamlessly with your team, allowing you to collaborate effortlessly.

High-performance social media scheduling tools like Sked Social can help you create an efficient working environment, even when working remotely. Sked Social is an all-in-one social media analytics tool with powerful scheduling capabilities and advanced reporting functions which can provide you with unique insights, allowing you to optimize your social media strategy and your content marketing strategy on an ongoing basis.

Its reporting features will enable you to create regular automated reports, so you can keep a close eye on your competitors and spot trends over time. All these insights are so valuable in helping you to fine-tune your social media marketing strategy, whether you’ve got an important campaign coming up or you just want to level up your social media marketing activity.

Apart from its advanced reporting functionality, Sked Social also includes a social media scheduler, which allows you to automatically schedule social media posts for every major social media platform, including Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and plenty of other social networks, saving you hours each week! Schedule posts, add hashtags, locations, and product tags all in one go. You’ll never have to post on a weekend again!

Don’t believe us? Try it yourself. Get started by signing up for Sked’s 7-day trial.

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