Researching your competition on Instagram

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Researching your competition on Instagram

One of the most important aspects to running a successful business is researching the competition and keeping up-to-date in regards to what they're doing. The same goes for Instagram. It's important to take a look at your competitor's Instagram profiles, see what type of content they're posting, and you can, maybe, even get some ideas for content that you can post to your own Instagram profile. I'm using an organization called Topsy Cake Design as my example organization, and Topsy Cake Design is a baking company that specializes in wedding cakes. So, I have a competitor in the baking industry that we're going to take a look at here in Instagram. So, from the Home screen, I'm going to tap on the search icon at the bottom of my device.

From here, I can search for the company that I'm looking for. The company that I'm looking for happens to be Marietta Cakes California, so I'm just going to tap in the search box, and I'm going to start typing Marietta Cakes. As you can see, the third result that appears is the company I'm looking for, Marietta Cakes California, so I'm just going to tap on that result to access their profile. Notice that they have a link to their Facebook page in the top, which is really important, and I'm going to talk about how we can add links to our own Instagram profile later on in the course.

But, if we scroll down, we can see the types of photos that they're posting. So, they seem to be posting mostly photos of their final product, baked goods, which makes sense. One thing that I'm noticing is that they're posting a lot of photos of cakes that have been customized for their customers, with the customer's name on them. This is a good idea, because it shows the personalization that the company does, as opposed to just posting general photos of cakes that haven't been personalized. If we tap on one of their photos, we can take a look at the type of captions that they're uploading to their photos.

One thing I'm noticing is that they're making good use of hashtags, but they're not adding a personalized comment to their photos. If I were to imagine myself as a potential customer, I think I'd like to know a bit more about each photo. What type of frosting was used? What flavors are inside? What event was this cake for? So, that's one thing that we've learned that may be able to separate us from our competitors. At the same time, we can also take a look at some of the hashtags they're using and think about ways that we can use similar or the same hashtags on our own photos.

We may not wanna use all the hashtags they're using, but we can click to view each hashtag and see which ones have the most uploads. Those are probably going to be the most popular hashtags and the best opportunity for us to use to gain more awareness, here on Instagram. You should probably do this form of Instagram research for all of your competitors that have an Instagram account. It can really give you some great ideas for your own content. Remember to put yourself in the shoes of a customer as well, when you're viewing their profiles, so that you can also decipher ways that they may be able to improve their posts, and then you can make use of your own findings on your own profile.

Again, it's always important to research your competitors on Instagram. Know what they're doing, the type of content they're posting, and that will definitely help you tailor your content for your Instagram profile.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/instagram-for-business-2/researching-your-competition-on-instagram