How to Do Competitor Research on Instagram

Competitor research on Instagram comes down to five steps: build a shortlist of accounts, sort each one's feed by engagement to find their winners, identify the patterns behind those winners, save the best examples somewhere organized, and put the numbers in a spreadsheet so you can track change over time. You can do all of it from a browser with public data — no expensive analytics suite, no spying on private dashboards.

The step most people skip is the sorting. Instagram shows every profile newest-first, so casual scrolling tells you what a competitor posted recently, not what worked. Fix that one thing and the rest of the process gets dramatically sharper.

Step 1: Build a competitor shortlist worth studying

Aim for five to eight accounts in three tiers: direct competitors at your size (their wins are immediately replicable), accounts one level ahead of you (they show the next playbook), and one or two aspirational giants (useful for format trends, but discount their raw numbers — distribution at that scale behaves differently). Find them through Instagram search, the "suggested accounts" that appear when you follow a competitor, and the comment sections where your audience already hangs out.

Step 2: Sort each feed by engagement, not recency

This is where the browser extension earns its place. With FeedRama's Instagram feed sorter installed — it's a free add from the Chrome Web Store if you don't have it yet — the process looks like this:

1. Open the competitor's profile on instagram.com in desktop Chrome.
2. Sort by likes first. One click reorders the grid from most-liked to least-liked, with the numbers visible on every post.
3. Re-sort by comments, then by views. Each metric tells a different story — likes show broad appeal, comments show conversation-starters, views show what the algorithm pushed. Posts that rank high on all three are the ones to study hardest.
4. Check their Reels tab separately. Reels reach beyond followers, so a competitor's Reels ranking often looks completely different from their grid ranking. More on this in How to Find a Creator's Best-Performing Instagram Reels.

On the free plan, each sort covers the account's previous 25 posts or previous week — fine for "what's working for them right now." For a full-history teardown of a big account, Pro removes the range cap.

Step 3: Read the patterns, not the posts

With a sorted feed in front of you, ask pattern questions across the top ten posts rather than admiring any single one:

• Format: Are the winners Reels, carousels, or single images? What's the ratio in their top ten versus their overall feed?
• Topic: Which subject areas keep appearing at the top? Which topics do they post often but never rank?
• Hook: What do the first lines of captions and the opening seconds of videos have in common?
• Cadence: Sort by date and check whether their growth periods line up with frequency changes.

That last gap — posted often, never ranked — is quietly the most useful finding in competitor research. It's a list of mistakes you don't have to make yourself.

Step 4: Save the evidence into folders

Pattern-spotting only compounds if you keep receipts. FeedRama includes save folders, so you can bookmark standout posts and accounts into collections like "hook ideas," "carousel structures," or one folder per competitor. When a post might disappear or you want it for a slide deck, the Instagram downloader saves the video or full carousel locally (10 downloads a month free). Over a quarter this becomes a proper swipe file — here's how we structure ours.

Step 5: Put numbers in a spreadsheet and revisit monthly

Memory flattens everything; spreadsheets don't. On Pro, FeedRama exports any sorted feed to CSV — post URLs, dates, likes, views, comments, shares, saves, and captions in one file. Pull each competitor monthly and you can answer questions sorting alone can't: Is their engagement trending up or down? Did the format switch actually change their numbers? Which of the five accounts is genuinely growing? The full tracking setup lives in How to Track Competitor Engagement in a Spreadsheet.

How this compares with the alternatives

Enterprise suites are legitimate tools — if you manage twenty client accounts, automated tracking is worth paying for. For a creator or small team studying a handful of competitors, sorting feeds in the browser gets you most of the insight at a fraction of the cost and none of the onboarding.

Keep it ethical

Everything here uses data any logged-in visitor can already see, which is ordinary market research. The boundaries: don't try to access private accounts, don't repost a competitor's content as your own, and treat their ideas as inputs to your originality rather than templates to trace. You're studying the market, and the market can see you back.

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