How to Track a Competitor's Instagram

Public on any business or creator account: follower and following counts, total post count, every feed post and Reel with its caption, hashtags, likes and comments, the pinned posts, the bio and link, and highlights. Reels show a play count, which is the closest thing to a reach proxy you will get.

Private to the account owner: reach, impressions, saves, shares, profile visits, link clicks, audience demographics, and almost all story metrics. Any tool claiming competitor reach for Instagram is estimating from engagement, and the estimate carries wide error bars.

Stories are the awkward middle. They are visible while live if the account is public, and they disappear after 24 hours unless saved to highlights. That means story strategy is only observable if someone looks daily, which is why most competitive analysis silently ignores a channel competitors use heavily.

Five fields per post are enough: date, format (feed image, carousel, Reel), theme in a few words, likes and comments. Add play count for Reels. Thirty posts gives you a stable baseline for that account.

At account level record follower count and post count with the date. The follower delta between checks is the only growth figure available externally, and it is more reliable than any engagement metric because it is a single visible number rather than a sum.

Keep highlights in view too. Highlights are curated by the brand and change rarely, so what they choose to keep permanently is a clean statement of what they consider their strongest proof: testimonials, product demos, founder story, press.

Format mix is the most actionable thing on Instagram, because platform distribution differs sharply by format and competitors reveal their bet through what they publish. A shift from feed posts to Reels over a quarter is a strategy change, not a stylistic one.

Compare engagement per format within the account rather than across formats globally. Reels typically produce higher raw numbers because they reach beyond followers, so mixing them into an overall average makes an account look like it improved when it only changed format.

Carousels deserve separate attention. They tend to earn more comments and saves relative to reach, and a competitor leaning into carousels is usually optimising for depth rather than for discovery.

Express every post as a multiple of that account median engagement, using the median rather than the average so one viral post does not distort the baseline. Anything at two times or above is a genuine outperformer for that account.

Then check whether the outperformer was paid. Instagram boosts appear in the Meta Ad Library, so the same check that works for Facebook works here. Boosted posts belong in a separate list from organic ones.

Follower-based engagement rate falls as accounts grow, so only compare accounts in similar follower bands. Comparing a 3,000-follower brand with a 300,000-follower brand on that metric produces a conclusion about audience size dressed up as a conclusion about content.

Manually, a monthly pass of thirty posts per competitor takes about twenty minutes and is enough for content strategy work. Follower counts are worth recording more often, weekly if growth is the question you care about, because the delta is what matters and it is one number.

Stories are the exception that manual work cannot solve, since they expire. If a competitor clearly runs their business through stories, either accept the gap in your analysis or check daily for a defined period rather than pretending occasional checks cover it.

Oppira tracks Instagram posts, Reels, engagement and follower history daily for the competitors you follow, and separates boosted posts, which removes the twenty minutes and makes the format-mix comparison something you can look at weekly.