Data-driven studies from the SocialToolsAI dataset. We run the analysis on real, public Instagram accounts and publish the numbers behind the takes that everyone has an opinion on.
Reels and photos engage almost identically on the median post - but 70% of the top 1% of posts by engagement rate, and 84% of the top 0.1%, are Reels. Same engagement floor. Much fatter right tail. The standard 'Reels-first' advice is half right, for the wrong reason.
Every guide tells you to slow down because per-post engagement drops. They're missing half the picture. We pulled cadence and engagement data from 2,400 public Instagram accounts and found that total weekly engagement keeps climbing as posting frequency goes up - even when per-post rate falls.
More studies are in the works. Topics we're sitting on data for: niche-specific cadence curves, the half-life of a viral post, carousels versus single photos once that signal is clean, and what audience overlap actually predicts. Sign up to get them when they go live.
Every study on this page runs on the same underlying dataset that powers SocialToolsAI's Competitor Map and Rival Scout: public Instagram accounts surfaced through audience-overlap scans, with recent-post engagement collected at scan time.
We use medians instead of means wherever possible because a single viral post can distort a mean for weeks. We control for follower size by binning into cohorts (1k-10k, 10k-100k, 100k-1M, 1M+) because the same posting cadence behaves very differently at different audience scales.
Where a finding only holds in one cohort, we say so. Where the sample is too thin to draw a conclusion, we leave the conclusion out. The goal is studies that hold up - not headlines that don't survive a re-read.
Competitor Map analyzes your audience and uses AI to find the accounts actually in your niche, with median engagement and best posts for each.
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