We're delighted to launch competitor insights for Instagram, now available in Sked Social.
Competitor insights is included for customers on the Professional plan and above, and operates hand-in-hand with our existing Instagram post, story and follower insights for your account.
Why track Instagram competitors?
Sometimes a bit of competition can be a good thing. Having a clear understanding of how your competitors (or similar brands) are performing helps you to improve your strategy, find what you are doing well, and identify what's working for others that you might have not considered.
Sked's competitor insights helps you compare and contrast both absolute values (like the number of followers) and proportions (like the percentage of follower growth), so you can compare yourself to leading brands as well as those of a similar size.
Ultimately, like all marketing activities, it's important to periodically review how you are performing compared to similar brands to make sure you're on the right track.
We're launching this tool during the COVID-19 pandemic, where Instagram data will be hugely skewed for many brands.
During these kinds of periods (even just around major holidays like Christmas), keeping an eye on the competition's performance helps you understand if you're doing well or have room for improvement.
How Sked's competitor analytics works
After you've connected your Instagram Business Account to Sked, we'll start collecting post, follower and story analytics for your account.
You can then add up to 4 competitor accounts to track, and we immediately start collecting data.
Keep in mind that Instagram only allows us to track competitor accounts that are Instagram Business Accounts, so you can't track individuals or personal accounts.
You can export the data straight to PDF, and an Excel export for competitor data is coming soon to compliment our Excel export for insights data.
Our competitor analytics shows tracking data for a rolling 30 day window, so some metrics (like the overall follower change) won't show until we've been collecting data for a full 30 days, but in the interim you can use our day-to-day charts to check in on how you're performing:
Which brands should you track?
With Sked, you can track up to 4 accounts in addition to your own (for a total of five).
You should pick brands that you compete with directly of course – for example Nike would want to compare their performance to Adidas.
However it's not always just about the direct competitors, as it may also be helpful to look to compare accounts that also market to a similar audience (such as another local business), or of partners that also sell the same or similar goods (such as resellers or department stores who complement your eCommerce sales).
Another good way to think about the brands to track is to look at who else your followers are engaging and interacting with.
You can also see the similar accounts that Instagram recommends - when you first follow an account, Instagram will suggest three other accounts you 'might also like to follow'.
The Instagram competitor metrics you can track
Much like the Instagram insights we have for your own account, we let you track quite a few different metrics to let you discover the insights that you can put into action.
Here's a quick summary of the metrics we show.
Summary data on audience, content, posting habits and engagement
At the top of our Instagram competitor analytics you'll find a table with different data points you can compare across accounts. We highlight the 'best performing' account for each metric.
These metrics include:
Follower numbers and changes in followers over the last 30 days
Number and type of posts (e.g. do you post more videos than other brands?)
The number of posts made each day
Average engagement rate, comments and likes for posts made
Day-to-day charts comparing growth, posting and engagement
Below the summary tables we show line graphs with the day-to-day metrics. You can use these charts to note particular events that cause a big increase (or decrease) in performance.
The charts summarise:
Follower growth
Number of posts per day
Number of likes or comments across all posts for each day
Content performance
But it's not just purely about numbers. Knowing another brand has a higher engagement rate is helpful, but the number won't tell you why.
Our content performance reports will.
You can easily see the top 5 posts by time, total engagements (likes and comments together), likes, or comments across all of the accounts you're tracking.
We'll also show you the content type of each post (video, carousel, image…) so you can quickly identify if the top posts are all of one particular kind, and you can click through from the thumbnail to view the full Instagram post to discover more.
You can also drill down by viewing the top 5 for each account individually, and see what content drove the most activity for that account for the month:
