How to find your competitors on TikTok and Instagram (the creator version)

• Same viewers. Someone who watches their videos would plausibly watch yours. A skincare account for acne-prone teens and one for mature skin share a topic, but not much of an audience.
• A format you could make. If they film salon-lit tutorials with a crew and you record voiceovers at your desk, their outliers won’t transfer. Pick accounts whose videos you could make with your own setup within a week.
• A size where their numbers mean something. A 3-million-follower account’s usual video tells you little about what a 5,000-follower account can expect. The size-band rule below handles this.

Leave out three kinds of accounts: celebrities and brands, whose reach comes from outside the app; accounts posting in another language or for another country; and accounts that haven’t posted in a month. They can still inspire you. They just don’t belong on the list you measure yourself against.

Start with 5–10 search phrases. “Makeup” is too broad. “Hooded eye makeup”, “oily skin routine” or “drugstore foundation dupes” return creators who make what you make. Note every account that turns up twice or more below.

1. Account search. Type a phrase and open the accounts (users) results. Follower counts sit under each name, so you can skip accounts far outside your size band. Some app versions add a follower-range filter here; if yours has one, use it.
2. Video search with a date filter. Filter video results by date posted and set it to the last week or month. Sorting by most liked favors older videos that had months to collect likes, so you end up studying who won last year.
3. Suggested accounts. After you follow an account, TikTok usually suggests similar ones: a quick second opinion from the app itself.
4. Hashtag pages. Tap a specific tag on a niche video (#hoodedeyes, not #makeup) and note the creators who appear more than once. Broad tags mix every niche and every account size.
5. Sound pages. Tap the sound on a niche video to see other videos that use it. Original sounds work best: whoever reuses a niche creator’s voiceover is almost certainly making videos for the same viewers.

Following lists. Once you have three or four good accounts, open the accounts they follow, if the list is public. Creators often follow peers in their niche.

Instagram hides more numbers than TikTok, but it gives you better hints about who shares an audience with whom.

1. Search. Search the same phrases and check both the account and the Reels results. Reels results show creators who make videos on the topic, not just accounts with the phrase in their name.
2. Similar accounts. When you tap Follow on a profile, Instagram shows suggestions of similar profiles (Instagram Help Center). Creators can switch this off for their own profile, so some accounts show none.
3. Audio pages. Tap the audio name at the bottom of a Reel to open a page of other Reels that use the same audio (Instagram Help Center). As on TikTok, a niche creator’s original audio is the best lead.
4. Comments under bigger accounts. Read the top comments on recent Reels from the two or three largest creators in your niche. Commenters with a niche bio and Reels of their own are often creators your size, chasing the same viewers.
5. Collabs. A Collab post appears on both creators’ profiles with both names at the top. The accounts your competitors collaborate with usually share their audience.

Instagram shows Reel views on a profile’s Reels tab but keeps reach and saves private, so you will judge Instagram competitors on views and comments. The Instagram competitor analysis guide covers what to log.

Keep the list at 5–10 accounts. Fewer, and one account’s lucky month skews everything; more, and you stop watching any of them closely. Here is the mix we use, for a creator at 8,000 followers:

We draw the core band at 10× because accounts that close reach viewers you could reach in the next few months. Far beyond that, their reach rests on an audience you don’t have yet, so their numbers say little about yours.

Just starting, with a few hundred followers? Size the list by views instead: pick accounts whose usual video gets 1–10× your usual views.

Review the list about once a month. Drop accounts that stopped posting, changed topic or outgrew the band, and add the small accounts behind new breakouts.

The methods above find accounts that look like competitors. This one finds the accounts winning viewers in your niche this month, including ones too small to rank in account search.

TikTok says that neither follower count nor a history of high-performing videos is a direct factor in what its For You feed recommends (TikTok newsroom). Views are handed out video by video, by interest. So a 3,000-follower creator whose video is collecting 40,000 views a day competes for your viewers right now, harder than a 2-million-follower account whose last ten videos stalled.

1. Collect 30–50 recent videos. Search your phrases with the date filter on the last month, or search a keyword in our free trend finder, which ranks recent niche TikToks and Reels by views per day.
2. Rank them by views per day. Total views reward age. A two-week-old video at 300,000 views has averaged about 21,000 a day; a two-day-old one at 80,000 has averaged 40,000. The newer one matters more this week.
3. Circle the small accounts with big videos. Note who made the top 20 and their follower counts. On TikTok, a video with more views than its creator has followers traveled well past that creator’s own audience: they found an idea your viewers want.
4. Check whether it repeats. Open the profile, or run it through the free outlier finder. One breakout can be luck. Two or three videos at 3× the creator’s median means a repeatable format, and a place on your list.

Use views ÷ followers only to pick accounts. To judge a video, compare it with the creator’s own median, as the outlier videos guide explains: a big account’s ordinary video can sit far below its follower count, and a small account’s far above it.

Our beauty TikTok sample holds 145 recent public videos from 130 creators, posted in the last 21 days and ranked by views per day. 50% of the 145 with a known follower count got more views than their creator has followers. Of the 30 fastest, 12 came from accounts under 100,000 followers and 3 from accounts under 10,000. Below are the creators under 100K followers behind the fastest videos that got at least 2× as many views as they have followers, the shortlist the performance-first method would give a beauty creator:

Our Instagram samples rarely include follower counts, so for Reels we compare each creator with themselves: the median views of their other Reels in the sample (only those older than three days, when there are at least three). It is the same signal from a different angle: a creator whose idea outran their usual reach.

1. Log their last 20 videos. Date, link, views, length, sound, format and first line. The TikTok and Instagram competitor analysis guides have a template to copy. To score them side by side, see competitor analysis for creators.
2. Find each creator’s median and flag outliers. Use videos older than three days, and the median, since one viral hit wrecks an average. 3× the median or more is an outlier; the outlier guide shows how to read 2×, 3× and 10×.
3. Copy the mechanic, not the topic. The hook, the structure, the format and the role of the sound. Film it in your own voice and score it against your own median after three days.

• Only giants. Their numbers come from an audience you don’t have, so every comparison makes your videos look like flops.
• Picking by follower count alone. It measures the past. Views per day and each creator’s median measure what works now.
• Never updating it. A list that is six months old describes a niche that has moved on.