Social media has evolved significantly in recent years.
It is turning from a platform for interaction with friends to a profitable marketplace for businesses offering almost any kind of product or service.
Instagram is now a leader in that ecosystem. It has a 10% higher engagement rate than Facebook and as much as an 84% higher engagement rate than Twitter.
In recent times, there have been a number of updates that illustrate how Instagram is leading the charge for businesses. Implementation of a ‘Shop now’ button for fast shopping, along with the ability to add links to stories has seen the Instagram advertiser count grow to over 2 million.
Besides, according to Instagram internal data, it has over 800 million active monthly users, more than 300 million accounts that use Instagram stories every day, and an intriguing 80% of users who follow brands.
With so many businesses coming to the platform, it’s important to keep an eye on your Instagram competitors to stay relevant and be able to compete. Researching your competitors can help you improve your marketing game, and gain new followers and clients.
Knowing the strategy of your Instagram competitors is essential for successful Instagram marketing. Your competitors target the same people as you do, so monitoring their approach gives you an opportunity to learn their tricks and avoid mistakes. What’s more, many of your potential new customers are following your competitors’ accounts.
In order to effectively monitor your competitors, first, you need to find them. And without the help of a robust Instagram research platform, this process can be extremely time-consuming. The rest of this article will identify a number of ways you can find your Instagram competitors with the help of a tool called Combin.
Offer: Want to find your Instagram competitors, engage with their followers, and explode your following? Get started with Combin for free here.
How to find global Instagram competitors
- Download and install Combin. It’s available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
- Login with your Instagram account. It supports two-factor authentication and doesn’t store or share any private information.
- Open the search tab and click the Add New Search button.
- Perform a search using a few hashtags related to your business.
- Monitor the most popular results. Authors of posts that look similar to what you publish and promote are your global competitors.
How to find local Instagram competitors
- Open the search tab and click the Add New Search button.
- Type in the hashtag of interest.
- Pick a place, city, region or country.
- Refresh the search to load more results if needed.
- Sort the search results by popularity. Authors of posts that look similar to what you publish and promote are your local competitors.
Once you have compiled a list of Instagram competitors, you can start engaging with their content, their influencers, as well as with accounts that follow and comment on them.
How to find Instagram influencers from your competitors
Many Instagram businesses use branded hashtags. Such hashtags are mentioned by brands’ followers during various campaigns, by influencers for promotion, and by brands themselves for their own publications. Follow the instructions below to find posts of brands’ influencers.
- Look through your competitor’s feed and pay attention to the hashtags they use. Find a branded hashtag and copy it.
- Launch Combin, create a new search and paste the branded hashtag into the field.
- Specify the number of search results per page and click Find.
- If needed, refresh the results after the first page is loaded.
- Sort the results by the number of likes or comments to see the most popular posts first. Authors of posts that are promoting or reviewing your competitors’ product or service are likely to be their influencers or otherwise popular bloggers who can spread the word about your brand as well.
How to find new relevant hashtags
Monitoring the hashtags related to your brand keeps you up to date with new posts of potential customers and competitors, and helps to find interesting accounts for following and interacting, that are crucial for brand awareness.
Be careful because Instagram ‘shadow-bans’ accounts that use the same set of hashtags for each post. In other words, the posts of these accounts are not shown in the Instagram hashtag search, the reach is being purposely cut off, and your chances of being recommended to other users drops drastically.
Here’s how to find new hashtags for your posts to prevent being shadow-banned:
- Type in the hashtag you already use and perform a search through Combin.
- Sort the results by popularity.
- Click the right mouse button to select popular posts that look like something you would post to your business account.
- Hover the cursor over the Add Search option on the appeared menu for the post.
- The drop-down menu contains all the hashtags mentioned in the post which you can now use too.
How to find Instagram accounts that follow and comment on your competitors
It’s important to remember that you and your competitors share the same customer base. In order to expand your Instagram community, find people that follow, like, and leave comments on the posts of your competitors.
- Open the Combin search tab and click Add New Search.
- Pick User Search.
- Select either the Followers or Commenters search type.
- Type in the Instagram username of your competitor.
- Specify the number of search results per page and the last time the commenters or followers of the account were active on Instagram.
- Click Find.
Engage with potential influencers and followers through Combin
In order to grab the attention of your competitor’s influencers, followers, and commenters, you need to engage with them by following, liking and commenting.
Following
- Perform a search for the followers or commenters of your competitors.
- Select all or specific accounts from the search results and click the follow button at the upper left corner of the application window.
- Pay attention to the number of followers the accounts have and their followers/following ratio – the bigger the account, the less chance they are of following back. To avoid engagement with these accounts, click the right mouse button after selecting them, and pick the Hide option from the drop-down menu. The accounts won’t be blocked on Instagram itself, they will just be hidden from Combin.
Liking
Through Combin, you can leave likes for Instagram posts found by hashtag and location, as well as like the most recent posts from Instagram accounts.
Posts liking
- Perform a search by specific hashtag, location, or a combination search by hashtag + location.
- Select posts from the search results and click the like button located at the upper left corner of the application window.
- Combin creates a liking task for the selected posts, and the task is scheduled accordingly to the individual Instagram hourly and daily activity limits immediately after that. You can monitor the progress in the History tab.
User liking
- Perform a search by followers/commenters of specific accounts (Search tab > User search) or pick accounts from your followers (User’s tab).
- Open the application Preferences and set the default amount of recent posts to like. You can pick from 1 to 10 likes for each account.
- Select some or all users whose last posts you want to like.
- Click the like button located at the upper left corner of the application window.
Commenting
Commenting is one of the best ways to get your account noticed on Instagram if done correctly.
Don’t use repeated text and avoid leaving curt comments, it puts your account at risk of being banned or simply ignored, as these comments can’t help but give off a spammy look.
A good rule of a thumb is using at least four words. Try to comment with context to the post, not a general expression of approval, it has more chance of being noticed and sparks a conversation.
Here’s how to comment:
- Perform either user or posts search through Combin.
- Select the preferred number of posts or users from the search results.
- Click the comment button located at the upper left corner of the application window.
- Type in the text of your comment to the first field of the comment field.
- Click the plus sign to add a new comment. Repeat as many times as needed.
- Click the bookmark sign at the bottom of the comment field to save the text as a template for future use.
- Open the commenting filters to exclude unwanted actions from the task before scheduling it. General commenting filters can be found in Preferences, local filters are located at the upper left corner of the commenting menu.
- Push the ‘Add Comments’ button to schedule a task. Comments will be left randomly by the application in accordance with the commenting preferences you’ve set.
Offer: Want to find your Instagram competitors, engage with their followers, and explode your following? Get started with Combin for free here.
Guest author: Mia Meier is a social media marketing connoisseur. Always hungry for latest digital PR trends and new, effective ways and tools for management and promotion, she shares the best of her findings with the world.