Instagram Adds Competitive Insights for Professional Accounts

Overview:

• Instagram introduces Competitive Insights to help marketers compare their performance with other similar profiles.
• Marketers can select up to 10 competitor accounts and then review how they perform across follower growth, publishing frequency, and individual post results.
• This can help marketers with refining social media strategy.
• House of Marketers insights for marketers

Instagram has introduced Competitive Insights, a new feature within the Professional Dashboard. This is designed to help creators and brands understand how their content and account growth compare against similar accounts.

While this is not a full competitive analytics suite, it does mark a meaningful step toward helping marketers make more informed decisions about their social media strategy.

What is Instagram’s Competitive Insights?

Competitive Insights gives professional accounts a side-by-side view of how their content output and audience growth compared to other similar accounts.

According to screenshots shared by digital marketing advisor at Meta, Sarah Roizman, the feature is now rolling out gradually to business and creator profiles. Once enabled, it appears inside the Professional Dashboard menu.

With Competitive Insights, marketers can select up to 10 competitor accounts. They can then review how they perform across follower growth, publishing frequency, and individual post results. Even if an account hides its like count, you can still view it inside Competitive Insights.

The goal is to help brands understand whether they are pacing correctly against their category and identify early signals about what content formats may be working.

However, Instagram does not yet provide deeper contextual signals such as shares, saves, or click-through activity, which limits diagnostic value.

How Competitive Insights Works

1. Select up to ten competitor accounts
2. View follower growth trends
3. Compare posting frequency across surfaces
4. Explore individual post performance
5. Review results within the Professional Dashboard

Because the comparison is one-to-one and not aggregated, the tool is currently best used for nominal reference rather than deep analysis.

Why This Matters for Marketers

Competitive Insights lets creators and brands quickly compare their performance to peers, without relying on third-party tools. This can provide helpful context for refining strategy, particularly when it comes to pacing and positioning.

By seeing whether similar accounts are posting more frequently or growing faster, teams can make more informed decisions around:

• Posting frequency 
• Content planning
• Budget conversations
• Internal stakeholder reporting

However, while Competitive Insights has some use, its scope remains limited. The tool focuses primarily on Awareness-level indicators (posting volume and follower growth) and does not yet provide the deeper behavioural or conversion metrics.

Instagram has said that shares, saves, views, and clicks are stronger signals of relevance than follower count. Because these aren’t included, Competitive Insights is best for surface-level benchmarking.

Adam Mosseri has repeatedly noted that creators should optimise for content that is watched and forwarded, rather than simply liked or followed. This is because users rely more on algorithmic recommendations than explicit follows.

Without these components, Competitive Insights provides useful reference points, but not full strategic clarity. Still, its introduction is notable. For now, it serves as a helpful starting point.

What’s Next

While Instagram has not confirmed future development, Competitive Insights appears positioned for expansion.

Potential next steps could include:

• Multi-account aggregated insight
• Share/save benchmarking
  Audience overlap reporting
• Conversion data
• Category-level trend views

If these are added, Competitive Insights could evolve into a genuinely powerful campaign-planning layer within the app.

House of Marketers Insights

Competitive Insights is a positive step toward more professional analytics on Instagram. For brands, the main benefit is context. You can quickly see how often others in your space are posting and how fast their audiences are growing. This helps with planning and explaining performance to internal teams.

However, this tool should be seen as an early indicator, not a complete strategy guide. Follower growth does not always reflect whether content is resonating or driving meaningful action. The signals that matter most, such as shares, saves, clicks, and overall engagement quality, are not included here.

Because of that, Competitive Insights should support your reporting rather than replace it. Use it to understand the landscape, then rely on deeper analytics to learn why content performs and where you can improve.

Even so, this new view is still helpful for day-to-day marketing. It gives brands a quick benchmark without needing third-party platforms. If Instagram expands this feature to include more engagement and conversion data, it could become an important tool for campaign planning and optimisation.

Conclusion 

This update may seem minor in isolation, but collectively, they represent a larger evolution in how Meta & Instagram are aligning their platforms with user behaviour and creative demand.

These updates build on Instagram’s broader push to expand creative possibilities. Over the past few months alone, we’ve seen:

• Meta Releases 2025 Festive Season Guide Highlighting AI, Reels, and Data-Driven Sales
• Meta Rolls Out New Web Dashboard & Performance Metrics with Expanded Insights
• Meta adds micro-level audience engagement data for marketers 
• Testing ad placements alongside popular Reels and more.

At House of Marketers, we believe updates like this encourage brands to stay flexible and continuously improve their social approach as new tools emerge. If you are looking to capitalise on these opportunities and turn them into action, House of Marketers can help. 

At House of Marketers, we help businesses craft impactful influencer marketing campaigns across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Contact House of Marketers today and future-proof your marketing strategy!