How to find competitors on Instagram, starting from hashtags
How do you find competitors on Instagram? Search the hashtags your customers use, open each tag’s recent posts, and write down the business accounts that keep turning up. Then sort them into real competitors and look-alikes by checking who they sell to, where, and at what price. You can do all of it for free inside the app. This guide gives the full routine, a table to keep the results in, and a faster way to do the hashtag half once your list grows past a handful of tags.
Why hashtags find competitors better than search
Typing your product into Instagram’s search box returns whatever the app ranks highest: big brands, old accounts, and anything with your keyword in its name. That list mostly shows who is famous.
Hashtags show who is posting where your customers are looking, right now. A bakery that appears under #sourdoughbaking every week is competing for the same attention as you, whatever its follower count says. A big national chain with a million followers that never uses the tag is not in the same conversation at all.
So the method below starts from your customers, not from a list of names.
How to find competitors on Instagram, step by step
- Write one sentence about who you sell to and where. “Home bakers in Leeds who want starter kits.” That sentence decides which tags matter.
- List ten to twenty hashtags those customers use. Look at posts from your happiest customers and from accounts you already know are rivals. Keep specific tags and skip the giant generic ones. If you are unsure how to open a tag page, how to search hashtags on Instagram covers the phone and the web.
- Open each tag and scroll the recent posts. Note every business account, not just the pretty ones.
- Mark the repeats. One post under a tag proves little. An account that shows up under three of your tags is working your niche.
- Open each repeat account. Read the bio, the pinned posts and the last twelve posts.
- Sort each account as a direct competitor, an indirect one, or not a competitor (see the next section).
- Check what each one tags. The tags a competitor uses on their best posts are a list of tags you may have missed.
- Repeat every month or two. New accounts start up, and old ones change what they sell.
That is the whole job. The rest of this guide is about doing steps 4 to 7 well.
Sort real competitors from look-alikes
Appearing under the same tag does not make an account a rival. Sort each one on the same questions.
| Question | Direct competitor | Indirect competitor | Not a competitor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sells the same thing? | Yes | A substitute | No |
| Sells to your customers? | Yes | Partly | No |
| Sells in your area or market? | Yes | Maybe | No |
| Similar price level? | Close | Different | Unrelated |
| What you do with it | Study closely | Watch now and then | Drop from the list |
An indirect competitor is still worth a look. A bakery competes with a cake shop for the same birthday order, even though neither would call the other a rival.
Be careful with two kinds of account. Influencers and fan pages post under your tags constantly, but they are an audience or a partner, not a rival. Resellers and marketplaces use the same tags for different reasons. Put them in their own column so they do not clutter the competitor list.
What to record about each competitor
A notes file or a spreadsheet is enough. One row per account.
| Column | What to write |
|---|---|
| Handle | The exact username |
| Found under | Which of your tags it posted in |
| Type | Direct, indirect, or other |
| Posting rhythm | A rough count from the grid, and the days it posts |
| Typical response | Likes and comments on several recent posts, skipping the best one |
| Tags they use | The five or so under their strongest posts |
| What they do well | One honest sentence |
| What they leave open | A gap you could fill |
Skip each account’s single best post when you judge response. One viral post says little about a normal Tuesday. Look at six or seven recent posts and take the typical number.
Compare the hashtags, not only the accounts
Once you have three to five direct competitors, the most useful question changes. It stops being “who are they?” and becomes “which tags are they winning under, and which can I join?”
Do this by hand in three passes:
- Collect their tags. Copy the tags from each competitor’s recent posts into one list.
- Count the overlap. Tags that three competitors share are crowded. Tags only one uses are either a niche edge or a mistake.
- Check the size of each tag. A tag with a huge number of posts moves fast, so a new post is soon buried. A smaller, steadier tag often gives a small business a better chance of being seen.
Instagram caps a post at five hashtags, so the point of the exercise is choosing, not collecting. Your real output is a short list of five tags per kind of post. How to do hashtag research for Instagram walks through checking one tag at a time, and how to find trending hashtags on Instagram covers the fast-moving end.
The faster way, when the list gets long
By hand, three competitors and fifteen tags is an evening. Ten competitors and fifty tags, repeated every month, is a chore nobody keeps up.
Hashtag Ninja’s competitor hashtag analysis does the comparison half. You describe the job in a sentence, for example comparing two coffee tags and asking which is busier and which gets more engagement per post. It returns the plan it would run first: which tags, how many posts, over what window, and what it assumed. Planning is free and needs no account.
Running the plan needs a sign-in and an Instagram account you already control. Hashtag Ninja does not run the plan on an account of its own. The free tool’s small live measurement of one tag is different: that read runs on an Instagram account we operate, never on yours. You get back a written report and the posts behind it as a CSV. The report covers:
- side-by-side volume and engagement for each tag;
- the accounts that appear under both tags;
- companion tags one has that the other does not;
- posting rhythm for each, by hour and weekday.
The overlap line is the one that finds competitors: accounts that show up under several of your tags are the repeat names from step 4, found without the scrolling. You can re-run the same brief whenever you want the next window.
Start with the planner if you want to see the plan for your own tags. Pricing says what more rows cost once the free ones are used.
Manual or tool: which fits
| By hand in the app | With a plan and a report | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Free to plan; a run uses rows |
| Best for | A few tags, a small niche | Many tags, repeated checks |
| Time as the list grows | Rises with every tag | The same sentence each month |
| What you keep | Your own notes | A written report and a CSV |
| What you see | Whatever you scroll to | Measured volume, overlap and timing |
| Private accounts | Not visible | Not visible |
Neither route sees private accounts. Instagram keeps their posts off hashtag pages, so both are judging the public part of your niche.
What hashtags will not tell you
Hashtags find competitors who tag their posts. A competitor who never uses a hashtag will not turn up in this method. Cover that gap with other routes:
- Location tags for local businesses, since a rival in your town may tag the town and nothing else.
- Tagged posts on your own profile, which show where customers mention you and who they mention beside you.
- The Suggested accounts list on a competitor’s profile, which shows who Instagram thinks sits near them.
- Google. Search for what you sell plus your city, and note which businesses link to an Instagram page.
Hashtags also say nothing about sales. A competitor with busy posts may sell little, and a quiet one may be doing well. Treat engagement as a clue about attention, never as proof of revenue.
When the manual way is enough
You do not need anything beyond the app if:
- your niche is small and you already know most of the accounts in it;
- you track three to five competitors and a monthly check takes an evening;
- you are doing this once, for a launch or a pitch, and will not repeat it.
In those cases, run the eight steps, keep the table in a notes app, and move on. Doing it by hand the first time also teaches you what a good comparison looks like, which makes any tool more useful later.
A plan earns its place when the tag list is long, the check repeats, or someone else needs to see how you reached your list.
A routine you can keep
- Once a month, refresh your list of customer hashtags.
- Scroll each tag’s recent posts and mark accounts that appear more than once.
- Sort the new names into direct, indirect and other.
- Collect the tags your direct competitors lean on, and note the overlap.
- Pick five tags per kind of post and test them for a month.
That is how to find competitors on Instagram without guessing. Follower counts tell you who is big. Hashtags tell you who your customers can already find next to you.