How to find content ideas with a social media competitor analysis (90 days of real Instagram data from 3 brands)
I've stopped brainstorming content ideas and started pulling competitor data instead, then scoring every post against that account's own engagement rate median rather than raw likes. Tried it on 3 UK banks this week on the theory that if it works in banking it works anywhere.
Follower count and posting volume were both dead ends. Barclays UK has 86k followers and hit my 50 post ceiling in 75 days, Lloyds Business has 9.4k and posted 15 times, and their medians finished half a point apart.
86k followers or 9.4k, barely mattered. All 3 medians landed inside half a point.
Scoring each post against its own account baseline is where it got fun. Lloyds got 10.6x their median from one founder telling one story, and the strongest organic post Barclays managed in 90 days was a nail art reel captioned "Is this too niche? 💅". No product content anywhere in the top 5.
Lloyds is the one that stuck with me. Their Making Tax Digital posts are useful to exactly the right people and sat between 0.11% and 0.77%, while founder stories on the same account cleared 8%. Nobody wants the deadline explained to them, they want to watch someone else survive it.
Barclays also ran the identical Wimbledon reel 3 times in a week, so you can watch a repost die in real time.
One reel, 3 runs, 1 week. Run 2 kept about a fifth of run 1 and run 3 barely registered.
The 5 briefs I actually took out of it:
| Content idea | What the data said | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Turn every product announcement into a customer telling the story | Lloyds founder reel hit 10.6x their median, their own deadline posts sat at 0.11% to 0.77% | Reel or carousel, one named person |
| Explain the boring history of your category | Barclays' notes, contactless and "pound of silver" posts all beat their median with zero product mention | Static or 15 second reel |
| Post something deliberately off-topic once a fortnight | The nail art reel was their single strongest organic post in 90 days at 2.74% | Reel, low production |
| Rebuild the winner instead of reposting it | Same reel 3 times went 0.98%, then 0.20%, then 0.12% | New cut, same idea |
| Split content by job, reach or response | NatWest reels pull 1,800 to 2,600 views at 0.16% to 0.41%, their photos sit at 1.1% to 1.5% | Reels for reach, carousel plus question for replies |
Two things make the method work. Pull the whole 90 days rather than a top posts list, because top post rankings are survivorship bias in a nicer interface. Then score against each account's own median, since 100 likes at 9k followers is a different animal to 100 likes at 86k.
