BEST INSTAGRAM GROWTH TOOLS
How did this all get started, according to Instagram analytics?
Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion; at that time, Instagram only had 30 million users. Facebook saw the potential in Instagram, which now has over 1 billion monthly active users.
Since the acquisition, Facebook has worked diligently to build out the features of Instagram, adding:
- Instagram stories
- Instagram live
- Direct messaging
- Instagram business profiles integrated with Facebook Pages
- Instagram creator accounts
- Swipe up (Instagram stories)
- Carousel posts
The list truly goes on and on. Instagram has become a powerhouse for reaching users in engaging ways.
In order to maximize all of these features and create an Instagram profile that delivers real-world results, you’ve got to understand the trends and performance metrics of your Instagram content, audience, and more.
How can you do this?
Instagram business and creator profiles have access to a particular set of analytics provided by Instagram.
You must have a business account to access Instagram analytics.
If you know your Instagram performance stats, you’ll be able to use those to drive even better results and keep pumping out content that grabs the attention of your target audience.
We’re going to give you a breakdown of all of these metrics and exactly how you can use them to optimize your Instagram content strategy. Let’s go!
Instagram Analytics: What are Instagram Business Accounts?
Instagram knows that businesses use the platform to expand their endeavor and boost lead generation and conversion. For this reason, they’ve created many new features like shoppable posts, swipe up, as well as Instagram business accounts.
There are well over 25 million business accounts on Instagram to date, meaning that businesses understand the power that Instagram harnesses. In fact, 80% of internet users refer to Instagram when deciding whether or not to buy from a business or brand.
The good news is that having a business profile on Instagram is free and allows you to indicate what kind of business or creator you are, as well as add principal contact information directly to your profile bio.
How can you set up an Instagram business account?
Follow these steps:
- Tap the three horizontal lines in the upper right corner of your profile page
- Tap settings
- Tap account
- At the bottom, you’ll see blue text that will offer you the option to change your account to a professional account
You can then decide if you want a business profile or a creator profile (depending on your niche and products/services). They are very similar in nature. Creator profiles are usually used by those that are involved in creative services (art, writing, music, etc.) or are public figures.
Once you create your business profile, you can easily link your Instagram to your Facebook Page for your business as well, which is great for integration.
You’ll also have immediate access to Instagram analytics. Is this really necessary to be successful? Let’s find out.
Do You Need Instagram Analytics for Your Business?
If you are a business, it would be silly to ignore a key tool that Instagram offers you related to your reach, content performance, and more.
In order to tailor your strategy to your current performance, it’s vital that you understand how your content performs, how many people it reaches, how much engagement you get, and where your audience comes from, among many other things.
The more that you know about your niche, your content, and your audience, the better you can be at creating content that produces results.
It’s absolutely imperative that you learn how to use Instagram analytics tools and understand the importance of how your content performance on Instagram affects your business.
Why Use Instagram for Marketing?
Instagram has expanded their features for marketing, and now includes Instagram Ads and sponsored posts that will help you to reach more people in your target audience. This isn’t the only reason that you should consider Instagram for marketing.
Instagram’s primary user base is in the age range of 18-29, with a large percentage of users ranging from 30-49 as well, meaning you can reach a huge audience on Instagram no matter the age.
In terms of purchasing power, millennials (25-40 years old) were estimated to have spent 1.4 trillion dollars in 2020, making them the group to target. They are heavy users of Instagram, digitally literate, and also ready to put their money where their mouths are.
With such a heavy hand held by millennials, it’s important to reach them in effective ways; it’s shown that millennials are skeptical of traditional advertising and are more prone to follow ads and product features that they see on social or digital media.
The key in today’s marketing climate is authentic marketing materials, and Instagram offers brands the exact platform needed to be able to provide that. Word of mouth advertising is also very possible on social media due to the ease of sharing content.
Since people are more likely to trust recommendations from friends or family, having your content directly recommended through shares on social media is a huge deal.
Combining effective visuals with authentic marketing practices on Instagram builds a relationship with your target audience and proves better in terms of conversion and recommendations. For this reason, Instagram is perfect for marketing.
Using Instagram Insights and Analytics can help you tailor your marketing strategy to perfection.
Exploring Instagram Insights: Official Instagram Analytics
Instagram still enjoys high levels of engagement in comparison with other social media networks, making it perfect for influencer marketing and content marketing.
Regardless of whether or not you choose to use only content marketing or a combination of your own content marketing in partnership with influencer marketing, you need to understand the breakdown of Instagram analytics, officially called Instagram insights.
You’ll need to gauge your own content by Instagram insights as well as understand what to ask influencers for in order to understand how their content performs (if you decide to work with an influencer for marketing).
You have three main categories to consider when it comes to Instagram insights: activity, content, and audience.
Instagram Activity Insights
When you first open the Instagram insights page, you’ll see an insights overview. If you click on the accounts reached tab, you’ll see some general insights into the activity of your Instagram profile.
It will show you a variety of things:
- Accounts reached
- Followers and non-followers based on reach
- Content-type (stories, posts, etc.)
- Impressions
- Profile activity
If you’re not familiar, Instagram impressions are the total amount of times that your accounts could have been seen by Instagram users.
All of these different insights are important for a variety of reasons. Here are some of the ways that they can be useful:
- Profile visits: you have to understand how many people are viewing your profile to understand how many potential followers you could obtain through your content; this is especially useful if you’re running any particular campaigns. It’s also useful to know if you have a lot of low profile views because it may mean you’re not reaching the right type of audience or aren’t piquing the interest of your viewers.
- Website clicks: Instagram allows you to post an Instagram link in your bio. This is the only spot where you can post a clickable link on your Instagram, and you’ll be able to find metrics for how many people clicked on your bio link if you have one. It will be at the bottom of your Instagram insights page.
- Followers and non-followers: when you see how many followers and non-followers are viewing your content, you’ll be able to understand how much reach your content is getting. If only followers are viewing your content, you may want to consider ways that you can get your content out to new users, especially through hashtags, which we’ll discuss later.
- Impressions: You can take a look at how many impressions your content got against how many actual accounts were reached; this may mean that you have multiple content viewers or that not all of the accounts that had access to your content at one moment actually viewed it or engaged with it.
These are just some of the important insights that you want to consider when looking at your Instagram activity insights on the overview page.
Instagram Content Insights
Content is the most important thing for a good performance on Instagram, so you have to know how each piece of content performs to know which types of Instagram content are bringing in the best results.
Content on Instagram includes many different pieces— Instagram posts (video and photo), Instagram stories, reels, IGTV, and Instagram live. You will likely have a combination of many types if you have an effective IG content strategy.
You have to understand which type of content and what content subjects perform best with your target audience so that you can continue to see success through this key component of Instagram. Without top-performing content, you have nothing.
Many different factors affect your content performance on Instagram, including color scheme, aesthetic, brand image, composition, filters, captions, hashtags, and more.
You can gage your content performance through Instagram analytics and either cut certain content in the future that didn’t perform well or adjust it so that it’s more interesting to your target audience.
You can view your Instagram content insights in two different sections:
- Directly on the piece of content that you want to analyze
- In your main Instagram insights page
If you want to access your insights for a particular post, you can tap the Instagram post and view the insights at the bottom of the photo, which will tell you the likes, comments, shares, and saves. More details can be seen from your main analytics page.
We’ll talk more about the Instagram story insights below.
You should be looking for high levels of engagement on all Instagram content; this is what helps your Instagram content get more reach and be seen by more users; it may even land you in the explore page or in a hashtag feed as a top post.
Pay attention to other metrics as well, including:
- Posts saved
- Posts you’ve been tagged or mentioned in
- Post notifications
- Posts shared through DMs
- Posts that appear in the following tab
You may have had one of your followers see your content more than once; you’ll get two impressions for this and one reach. You ultimately can judge the success of your content by the amount of engagement it gets (likes, shares, comments, saves).
Instagram Audience Insights
Another key element to understanding your content is to understand your audience; once you know who is looking at your content, you can begin to make decisions.
You can look for ways to adjust your audience and get more users that fit a certain criteria, or you can also then create content for your particular users that are viewing your content.
When you look at Instagram insights for audience, you’ll have a plethora of information at your fingertips:
- Followers lost and gained
- Top locations of your followers (city and country)
- Age range (all, as well as gender breakdowns for men and women)
- Active times (hours and days)
All of these Instagram analytics give you detailed information about what kind of content may perform best on your Instagram as well as who is checking it out.
If you aren’t seeing any follower growth or are losing followers, you can then investigate that further and implement strategies to curb the numbers.
Similarly, if you notice you have a lot of engaged followers from a particular location, you can either leverage that or work on changing the majority location of your audience.
In addition, the active times of your followers helps you to decide when is the best time to post your content. You should always be aiming to post content that your followers will see; this means that you need to post your content at the times when your followers are most active.
For instance, if your followers aren’t active at 9pm but you mainly post at night, you may consider using a post scheduler or changing your posting times to when they are most active, for example, at 12pm.
The more you tailor your content strategy to your target audience, the better your performance stats will be.
Instagram Story Insights
As with Instagram posts, Instagram stories have their own set of insights. Instagram stories is one of the most popular features on Instagram, so you need to implement it into your content strategy or you’ll miss out on valuable exposure.
You’ll be able to see Instagram analytics for stories that you posted from the previous 24 hours up to 14 days prior, and you can categorize them by things like:
- Reach: how many individual accounts have viewed your story (regardless of how many times that individual account viewed it)
- Forwards: how many people tapped forward on your story
- Backs: how many times people tapped back on your story
- Exited: how many times people exited your story
- Impressions: The total number of views your story received, even if from the same account
- Next story: how many times your stories were skipped to the next story
If you have the swipe up feature, you’ll be able to see how many clicks were taken from that feature. You can also view how many people tapped on a tag that you had in your story to look at the profile, as well as how many people decided to check out your profile as a result of your story.
How to Get Better Engagement on Instagram
If you need to boost your engagement levels on Instagram, there are a few things that you can do to get more people to take action after viewing your content. Instagram analytics around engagement is the key driver of reach on the platform, so you need to have an active following to have successful content.
You can do the following things to boost engagement after viewing your analytics:
- Use hashtags: hashtags are the lifeblood of discoverability on Instagram, so if you’re not using them, you’re doing yourself a disservice. When you use a hashtag, your content gets categorized into that particular hashtag feed, being seen by all users who view or follow the tag.
- Create Calls to Action (CTAs): Using CTAs in your Instagram stories and captions is key in making sure you get high levels of engagement. Ask your users to respond, use interactive story stickers on Instagram stories, tell users to tag a friend or answer a question in the comments— there are many ways you can encourage engagement through CTAs on Instagram.
- Collaborate: Do Instagram lives that feature other users, host a giveaway that includes requirements such as following your account, liking content, and more, do an Instagram story takeover with another niche partner or an expert from your company. The more you work with other users on Instagram to increase your exposure, the more people you can reach.
Conclusion: Instagram Analytics Matter
When you know what type of performance your Instagram content is driving based on Instagram analytics, you can then make any adjustments to your content, hashtag, caption, or marketing strategy on the platform.
If you don’t review your Instagram insights, you’ll never know how to reach new levels of success.
Instagram insights were created for a reason, and they’re totally free— don’t miss out on the chance to have a deeper understanding of your Instagram content and audience for even better results in the future.
After all, it doesn’t make sense to continue doing something that isn’t working, does it? Alternatively, if something’s working well, you want to replicate it! Keep your Instagram performing at optimal levels with Instagram analytics.
Do you have any questions about Instagram analytics? Let us know!
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Written by Eddie Hurst
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