How to do a proper competitor analysis on any Instagram page (I'll walk you through one live)

Most people do competitor research by scrolling a profile, saving a few posts they like, and calling it a day. That's not competitor analysis. That's just inspiration hunting.

I'm going to walk through what an actual competitor breakdown looks like, using a trading meme page as the subject. 8,800 followers, 124 reels scanned. Here's how I'd think through this if I were building a competing trading page.

STEP 1: UNDERSTAND WHAT THE VIEWS ARE ACTUALLY TELLING YOU

First thing I look at is the gap between average and median views. This tells you whether an account's performance is real and consistent, or being carried by a few lucky reels.

Average views per reel is 75,900. Median is 16,700.

That's a 4.5× gap. Which means the average is almost useless as a benchmark — a small number of reels are doing the heavy lifting. If you're trying to reverse-engineer this page, you don't study the average reel. You study the ones pulling the average up.

So that's exactly what I did.

STEP 2: FIND THE REELS WORTH STUDYING

I use three filters to identify which reels are actually worth analyzing. Not all of them — just the ones that clearly broke through.

Filter 1 — 2× above median: 47 reels out of 124. These are the reels that meaningfully outperformed the typical post. Roughly 38% of their content clears this bar, which is actually high. Most accounts hover around 20%.

Filter 2 — 2× above average: 19 reels out of 124. These are the genuine breakouts — content that didn't just perform well, it performed at double what this page normally pulls. 15% of their catalog. These are the 19 reels I'd be watching on repeat.

Filter 3 — 1.5× VTFR (113,500+ views): 24 reels out of 124. VTFR is views-to-follower ratio — for this page it sits at 8.60, which is already exceptional. A reel clearing 1.5× VTFR means it reached far beyond the existing audience into cold traffic. 24 reels did that. Those are your true algorithm-breakers.

These 19–24 reels are the competitor's actual content strategy, whether they know it or not. Everything else is filler.

STEP 3: READ THE KPIs AS A SYSTEM, NOT INDIVIDUAL NUMBERS

Once you know which reels matter, the executive KPIs start making sense as a story.

VTFR of 8.60. This is the most important number on the page. It means every reel reaches, on average, 8.6× their follower count. That's an algorithm-first page — their content is getting pushed to non-followers at an unusually high rate. Whatever they're doing in the first 1–2 seconds of their reels, the algorithm is finishing the job for them.

Breakout Performance Rate of 37.9%. Nearly 4 in 10 reels significantly outperform their baseline. For comparison, a strong account might hit 20–25%. This page is producing above-average content at an above-average rate. It's not luck — there's a repeatable format in there.

Engagement Rate of 6.26%. Industry benchmark for "good" is 1–3%. They're at double that.

STEP 4: WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DO WITH THIS

Those 19 reels that hit 2× average? I'd watch every single one. Not to copy the joke or the meme, to understand the structure. What happens in the first second. How the text is laid out. Whether the audio is trending or original. What the comment section looks like and what people are reacting to.

The 24 reels that cleared 1.5× VTFR are the ones I'd try to recreate in my own voice. These reels reached cold audiences at scale. That's not a follower strategy, that's a distribution strategy, and the format is sitting there in plain sight.

This is what competitor analysis is supposed to produce: a shortlist of specific content you're going to study and adapt, not a general sense of "they post trading memes and it works.

The page I didn't explain: how I pulled all of this without spending a week manually logging 124 reels. If people want to know the workflow, drop a comment and I'll explain it in a follow-up.