Benchmark your Instagram account against rival brands

I am a brand social lead. Build me an app that shows how my Instagram account is doing against the rival brands I care about. Instagram's own insights only ever show me my own numbers, so I have no way to see whether a flat month was us or the whole category. This is a surface I open and work in, not something that runs on a schedule.

The main view is a benchmark board. I keep a list of competitor Instagram handles that I can add to and remove from, and the board shows one row per brand with: follower count, posting cadence (posts per week across the recent window), format mix across Reels, carousels and single images, and average engagement per post (likes plus comments) normalized by follower count so a big account and a small one can be compared fairly. Pull each tracked competitor with Instagram Business Discovery on their username, which returns their public profile fields and recent media in one call. My own row sits at the top of the same table, built from Get Instagram Account for profile and follower count, List Media for my recent posts and their formats, Get Media Insights for per-post performance, and Get Account Insights for account level reach and profile views. Use List Instagram Accounts if the app needs to resolve which professional account I manage.

Handle resolution failures need to be explicit. Business Discovery only reads public Instagram Business and Creator accounts, so personal accounts, private accounts, typos and deleted handles will not resolve. When that happens the row must say so in plain words, naming the handle and the likely reason, with a retry and a remove option. Never render an empty or zeroed row that I might mistake for a competitor who simply had a quiet month.

Clicking any competitor row opens a drilldown of that brand's recent posts ranked by engagement, each with thumbnail, permalink, caption, format, timestamp, likes and comments, so I can see the exact hooks and formats working for them. This comes from the same Business Discovery call requesting the media fields.

A category tab shows what is winning in our niche regardless of who published it. Use Search Hashtag to resolve each of my configured hashtags to its Instagram hashtag id, then Get Hashtag Media to pull the top posts on that hashtag this week, ranked by engagement, with a way to add a publisher I keep seeing there straight into my tracked list.

History is the part that makes this worth opening every week. Business Discovery only returns a point in time snapshot with no historical mode, so every time the board refreshes, append a dated row per brand to a Google Sheets tracker with Append Values: date, handle, follower count, posts in window, format mix, average engagement per post, and engagement rate. On load, read that history back with Get Values so the board can draw follower growth and engagement trend lines over weeks rather than just today's numbers. Write column headers on first use, key rows by date plus handle, and use Update Values to overwrite the day's existing row if I refresh twice in one day so the series stays clean. Show week over week deltas next to follower count and engagement rate wherever history exists.

Every competitor card gets a Tear down this competitor button backed by an embedded background agent. The agent reads that brand's recent posts through Business Discovery and my own top performers through List Media plus Get Media Insights, works out what they are doing that we are not in cadence, format and topic, and writes a dated teardown with concrete recommendations. It creates the document with Create Document, titled with the brand name and the date, then fills the body with Batch Update Document: a headline summary, our numbers next to theirs, what is working for them, what we should change, and specific example posts with links. Store the resulting document URL against that competitor in the app so the card links the latest teardown and keeps earlier ones accessible, and show the agent's run status on the card while it works.

This is used by me and my social team, so the tracked handle list, the hashtag list and the teardown links are shared app state that everyone sees rather than per user settings. Keep the board readable at a glance: sortable columns, my own row visually pinned and highlighted, and a clear refresh control that tells me when the numbers were last pulled.