Short answer: yes.

But let's back up, because it's a question more people should be asking.

Most Instagram users operate in a bubble. They follow accounts they like, scroll their feed, and build content based on what feels right. Meanwhile, their competitors are out there posting content that's consistently pulling massive engagement — and unless you're following them and paying close attention, you'd never know which posts are actually responsible for their growth.

Here's what most people don't realise: you don't need to follow someone to study them.

Instagram Is a Public Platform

Every public Instagram account is exactly that — public. That means you can view anyone's profile, their posts, their captions, and their likes without following them or even being logged in.

But viewing a profile and actually understanding what's working are two very different things.

When you scroll someone's grid manually, you're seeing posts in reverse chronological order. You're eyeballing likes. You're making educated guesses about what seems popular. That's not research — that's impression management.

Real research means being able to rank posts by performance, filter by time period, and understand which content genuinely resonated with an audience rather than just racking up a big number.

What You Actually Want to Know

When you look at a competitor's account, the questions that actually matter are:

• Which posts generated the most engagement relative to their audience size?
• Is it their Reels or their carousels that consistently outperform?
• Are their best posts from the last 30 days or from two years ago?
• What format, topic, or style appears across all their top performers?

None of these questions get answered by scrolling. They get answered by data.

How to Do It Without Following Them

Viral Finder lets you search any public Instagram account by username. You don't need to follow them, interact with their content, or even be logged into Instagram.

Type in the username, and the tool pulls up to 50 of their posts and ranks them by viral score — a weighted metric that accounts for likes, comments, and video plays, with extra weight given to comments because they indicate a deeper level of engagement. There's also a recency factor, so a post from last week isn't unfairly outranked by something from three years ago just because it had more time to accumulate likes.

What you get is a clear, ranked view of their best-performing content — without the noise of chronological scrolling, without following them, and without spending an afternoon manually doing maths.

What to Do With What You Find

Once you can see which posts actually performed, the analysis gets interesting.

Look at the top five. What do they have in common? Is it the post format? The caption style? The topic? The time they were posted?

Patterns in high-performing content aren't accidents. They're signals from the audience about what they want to see more of. When you can identify those signals on a competitor's account, you're essentially getting audience research for free — research that took them months of trial and error to generate.

Use it to inform your own content direction. Not to copy, but to understand what resonates with the audience you're both trying to reach.

A Practical Use Case

Say you're a skincare brand and there's a competitor you've had your eye on. They seem to post consistently and their engagement looks strong, but you're not sure what's actually driving it.

You run their username through Viral Finder. Their top posts are all educational carousels — ingredient breakdowns, myth-busting posts, "what your skin is actually telling you" style content. Their Reels and product shots sit much lower in the rankings.

You've been posting product photography and brand aesthetic content. You now know that's not what moves this audience.

That's one search. That's the kind of insight that would otherwise take months of observation and guesswork to arrive at.

The Bottom Line

You don't need to follow your competitors to learn from them. Their best-performing content is public, and with the right tool, it's completely analysable.

Start with 3 free searches on Viral Finder — no credit card required. Type in any public username and see exactly which posts are hitting hardest.

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