How to Find Top-Performing Posts on Instagram

Knowing which of your Instagram posts resonate most with your audience is the secret to repeatable success. Instead of throwing content at the wall and hoping something sticks, you can build a strategy based on what already works. This guide cuts through the noise and shows you exactly how to find your top-performing posts, use those insights to create better content, and keep your account growth moving in the right direction.

Why Finding Your Best Posts Is a Game-Changer

Dedicating a little time to reviewing your content performance isn't just about feeling good about high numbers. It's a foundational part of any smart social media strategy. When you consistently analyze what's winning, you unlock several major benefits:

• You stop guessing. You replace assumptions about what your audience wants with hard data, making your content creation process more efficient and effective.
• You understand your audience on a deeper level. Is your audience saving educational tips? Are they commenting on behind-the-scenes stories? Your top posts are a direct line into their interests and pain points.
• You amplify your reach and engagement. By creating more content in the formats and on the topics that perform well, you signal to the Instagram algorithm that your content is valuable, which can lead to broader distribution.
• You build a stronger brand. Consistently delivering high-value, engaging content builds trust and community, turning casual followers into loyal fans.

Method 1: Using Instagram's Native Analytics (Account Insights)

The best place to start is right within the Instagram app itself. If you have a Creator or Business account, you have free access to a powerful set of analytics called "Insights." This is your primary source of truth for post performance.

Step-by-Step Guide to Accessing Your Post Insights

If you're new to this, don't worry. Finding the right screen is simple. Here's how you get there:

1. Go to your Instagram profile page.
2. Tap the "Professional Dashboard" button located below your bio.
3. Under "Account Insights," tap "See all."
4. Scroll down to the "Content You Shared" section. Tap the arrow next to the post count to view performance data for all your content.

You're in! This dashboard is where you can filter and sort your content to spot the winners.

Sorting Your Content to Find Top Performers

Once you're in the "Content You Shared" dashboard, you'll see a series of blue filter links at the top. This is where you can slice and dice your data.

Step 1: Select Your Post Type. You can filter by Posts, Stories, Reels, or Live videos. Start by looking at "Posts" (which includes single images and carousels) and "Reels" separately, as the metrics that define success can differ.

Step 2: Define the Metric You Want to Analyze. This is the most important step. Tap the filter that defaults to "Reach" and you'll see a dropdown menu of different metrics. So, what should you look for?

• Reach: This tells you the total number of unique accounts that saw your post. Sorting by Reach is a great way to see which posts traveled the furthest and got in front of the most eyeballs. Your highest-reach posts often capitalized on a trend, used effective hashtags, or were shared widely.
• Saves: This is arguably one of the most powerful engagement metrics. A "save" indicates that someone found your content so useful or valuable that they wanted to bookmark it for later. Posts with high saves are typically educational, inspirational, or highly practical. Think tips, tutorials, checklists, or resource lists.
• Comments: Comments show that a post sparked a conversation. High-comment posts often ask a question, share a relatable or controversial opinion, or tell a compelling story. This is a strong indicator of community engagement.
• Shares: Shares mean your content resonated so much that someone sent it to a friend via DM or shared it in their Stories. Like saves, this is a powerful signal of value. High-share content is often funny, relatable, shocking, or deeply inspiring.
• Profile Visits/Follows: Did this post make someone curious enough to check out your profile or hit the "follow" button? Sorting by these metrics helps you identify the content that is most effective at converting viewers into followers.

Step 3: Set Your Timeframe. You can analyze performance over the last 7 days, 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years. Looking at the last 3 to 6 months is often a sweet spot - it's recent enough to be relevant to current trends but long enough to give you a meaningful amount of data.

By sorting your posts by each of these key metrics, you'll get a multi-dimensional picture of what's truly performing. A post with the highest likes might not have the most saves, and identifying those differences is what builds a sophisticated content strategy.

Method 2: The Manual Content Audit with a Spreadsheet

Instagram Insights is fantastic for a quick overview, but a manual audit using a simple spreadsheet can reveal deeper patterns that the app won't show you. This method involves looking beyond just a single metric and analyzing the qualitative elements of your content.

How to Set Up Your Audit Spreadsheet

Create a simple spreadsheet in Google Sheets or Excel with the following columns:

• Post Link/Date: A link to the post for easy reference and the date it was published.
• Post Type: Is it a Carousel, single image, Reel, etc.?
• Content Pillar/Topic: Categorize the post. Is it a 'Tutorial,' 'Behind the Scenes,' 'Myth Busting,' 'Client Testimonial,' or 'Personal Story'? Be consistent with your categories.
• Reach: Pull this number from Insights.
• Likes: Pull this number from the post.
• Comments: Pull this number from the post.
• Saves: Pull this number from Insights.
• Shares: Pull this number from Insights.
• Notes: This is for your qualitative analysis. What was the hook? Was the CTA effective? Was the visual style unique?

Spotting Trends and Patterns

Log your top 10-20 posts (based on reach or saves) from the last few months. Once the data is in your spreadsheet, you can sort it and start looking for patterns you might have otherwise missed:

• What format is winning? Maybe you'll discover that carousels with 5+ slides consistently get more saves, or that your Reels under 15 seconds have the highest reach.
• What topic consistently resonates? You might find that your posts about "beginner tips" always outperform posts targeting advanced users. This tells you who your engaged audience really is.
• What visual style performs best? Do Reels with your face in them get more comments? Do branded graphics with bold text get more saves than user-generated content?
• What CTAs (Calls to Action) work? Analyze the captions of your top posts. Did they ask a specific question? Did "Save this for later" prompts actually correspond with high save counts?

This method takes more time, but the insights are incredibly valuable. It turns numbers into a narrative about what your audience truly loves about your content.

Method 3: Analyze Your Competitors' Top Posts

Your own analytics are only half the story. To understand what works in your niche, it's enormously helpful to see what's performing well for competitors or creators who serve a similar audience.

How to Ethically Spy on Competitor Content

You won't be able to see their full Insights, of course, but you can gather a lot of information just from what's publicly available.

1. Identify 3-5 competitors or aspirational accounts in your space. Pick accounts that have an engaged audience you admire.
2. Scroll through their feed. Look for posts with an unusually high number of likes and comments compared to their average. Most accounts have a baseline level of engagement, so the posts that significantly exceed that baseline are your targets.
3. Focus on Reel view counts. This is even more telling than likes. Scroll through their Reels tab and look for the ones with view counts that are 5x-10x (or more) their follower count. These are their viral or semi-viral hits.
4. Take notes. Just like your manual audit, document the format, topic, hook, audio, and visual style of these top posts. Do you see a pattern? Are they all using a particular audio clip? Are their top-performing posts all list-style educational formats?

The goal isn't to copy their content. It's to understand the broader themes and formats that resonate with the audience you're both trying to reach. This can spark new ideas for your own content calendar.

Turning Your Findings Into an Actionable Content Strategy

Analysis without action is pointless. Once you've identified your top performers, the final step is to use that information to shape your future content.

• Create more of what works. This sounds obvious, but it's critical. If educational carousels are your top-saved posts, they should become a regular series in your content plan. If a specific style of humor in your Reels has the highest reach, lean into it.
• Double down on your winning "Content Pillars". Your audit likely revealed that 1-2 of your content pillars (themes) are responsible for most of your engagement. Make these pillars the core of your strategy, and treat other topics as occasional experiments.
• Repurpose and remix. A top performer doesn't have to be a one-time hit. Can you turn a top-performing carousel into a Reel? Can you expand on a high-comment single image post in a more detailed blog or video? Can you update a popular post from last year with new information? Maximize the value of your best ideas.

Final Thoughts

Finding your top-performing Instagram posts is a straightforward process of using native insights and looking for patterns in what connects with your audience. By regularly analyzing your data - and the data of those in your niche - you can stop guessing and start creating content that consistently fuels your growth and builds a thriving community.

As you've seen, consistently tracking performance is foundational to building a smarter content strategy. To help centralize this entire process, we built Postbase with a clean analytics dashboard that brings all these insights together. It lets you see what's working not just on Instagram but across all your platforms in one view, so you can make smarter decisions faster without getting lost in spreadsheets or clunky, outdated reports.