Instagram is a powerful tool to help leverage your business and show its presence across social media. By sharing posts, stories, and reels, your business can interact with followers and demonstrate customer engagement by replying to comments or answering questions. However, understanding your audience can be a difficult task at times. Luckily, Instagram Insights can lend itself to understanding your business’s primary demographic and how to engage with them to earn more likes, followers, and shares, inevitably growing your social media following. This blog will cover everything you need to know to start understanding these insights and using them to improve your Instagram profile.
Marketing Analytics Companies state that like other forms of marketing, data and analytics help measure the impact of what your business is sharing. But, you can also use it to define who your target audience is, post at a particular time to guarantee increased interaction, or experiment with different content. Many Instagram Marketing Companies suggest that keeping updated with your insights lets you understand what is working and what is not. Let’s begin by discussing the seven primary functions of Instagram Insights to help your business grow and become more successful on social media.
1. Measure Your Account Reach
Reach is defined by the number of unique users that have seen any of your Instagram posts. You can break this down into top posts, top stories, top IGTV videos, impressions, and profile activity. By analyzing this information, you can view commonalities between shared posts and see what your audience interacts with the most to hone in on that content. ‘Reach’ also includes metrics on post impressions, or the number of times your post was discovered on a particular section within Instagram, such as a hashtag, location tag, a user’s home feed, a search, or your profile. Using these insights can help determine whether your posts do better with the use of a particular hashtag or location tag to boost the post.
2. Track Profile Visits and Followers
On the ‘Accounts Reached’ page, under ‘Account Activity,’ you can find ‘Profile Visits.’ This number reflects how many times your profile has been viewed. This is a helpful tool in defining your profile’s conversion rate from profile visits to new followers. It can be calculated by dividing your number of followers by your number of visitors and monitoring to see if it increases or decreases over time.
3. Check website clicks
It’s always wise to include your business’s website so followers and new profile visits can learn more about what service or products you provide and sell, or learn more about your business in general. Website clicks reflect the number of times people have clicked on any website links you’ve included on your profile.
4. Track content interactions
Instagram Insights makes this easy to understand by breaking it down into likes, comments, and saves. You can view this information by navigating to ‘Insights Overview’ and then ‘Accounts Engaged.’ You can then pull up a specific post and see what your audience did to interact with it. For example, a post that performed well would have many likes, comments, and saves, unlike a post that did poorly, which would have a lower number. By tracking this data, you can find out what content style performs the best and what needs to change. But, of course, just because you think a post will perform well with your audience doesn’t guarantee that your followers will agree!
5. Track Number of followers
Tracking your number of followers is beneficial to see how your Instagram profile is performing as people interact with it. As your follower count increases, this should reflect high-profile engagement and content interaction. Conversely, if your follower count decreases steadily over time, this may be a sign that it’s time to switch things up and pivot your content. On the ‘Total Followers’ tab, you’ll see how many followers your profile has gained or lost in the past week, including the average times of day when your followers are active on Instagram. Again, this tool is beneficial when planning when to post on your story or account.
6. View User's Interactions
If you’re looking to find data and analytics regarding a specific post, whether it be a brand launch or announcement, you can tap on any of the posts on your profile and click ‘View Insights’ below the image or video. This section will show you users’ actions when interacting with that post, such as viewing your profile, clicking on a website link, or following you.
7. View Story Insights
Lastly, viewing your ‘Story Insights’ can be helpful in understanding how many users engage with the content you’re sharing for only 24 hours or the duration of story posts. Insights under this category include impressions, reach, taps forward, taps back, replies, swipe aways, and exits. In addition, stories can be helpful to show followers important information you want to share that doesn’t necessarily have a place on your profile, such as sharing other businesses’ content or highlighting an announcement.
Now that we’ve covered all of the essential Instagram Insights for your business profile, you’re ready to start accessing this information and implementing the best strategy to help your profile grow! You’ll be able to determine what’s working best and what might need to change so your business is more successful.
At Branding Bosses, we know it can be tough to start tackling a huge social media platform like Instagram to make it work best for your business. Still, by understanding a few of these insights, you’re on the right track to tracking benchmarks and growing user engagement!
