Instagram has 1 billion users every month, making it a part of most brand’s marketing efforts. Have you been using Instagram for awhile now, but not sure if you are seeing any success? Here are a few guiding principles to let you know if you are on the road to victory or if you have strayed and will help you get back on the right track.
Photo by Jean-Frederic Fortier on Unsplash
Using Instagram’s in app Insights to Track Success
One of the allures of using Instagram for marketing is the cost, which is very low compared to various forms of paid advertisements. There are several companies that offer a variety of services to help you “maximize” your social media efforts or promise that they will turn you into a “social media guru”. You do not need any of these paid services when you are just getting started – Instagram has taken care of most of the analytics you need, and we can teach you how to do the rest. If you have your brand set up as a business account, which you should because it has a lot of super cool features, Instagram has a built-in analytics section titled “Insights”. There are two different sets of insights, one that gives your stats on individual post, and one that goes over the past 7 days. In this blog post we will go over the individual post insights, check back next week for an in-depth discussion on how to analyze your entire Instagram account.
Terms to Know
Before we can dive into analyzing the data given to you, we need to understand the terminology that Instagram Insights will use:
- Impressions: The number of times your posts have been seen since publishing.
- Interactions: The number of actions taken on your account (likes, comments, profile visits, etc.).
- Reach: The total number of unique profiles that have viewed the post.
- Profile Visits: The number of people who visited your profile.
- Website Clicks: The number of people who clicked on the link to your website on your profile page.
- Call/email clicks: The number of people who used the link to your phone number/email found on your profile page.
- Mentions: The number of times your Instagram handle (@pagename) has been used by other users.
How to Interpret the Analytics
Now that we have covered what type of information Instagram provides to you, let’s discuss how to interpret this information to guide future post. Below is a post from someone’s personal account which they have made a business account. The picture on the left shows you what the post looked like when it was published on their feed. The next picture shows the analytics for the post. You can access individual post analytics for your content by clicking on the blue “View insights” button that appears directly below the picture and above where people can like and or comment. As you can see, this post got 121 likes, 1 comment, and was saved by 1 person. This is basic information that can be used to compare one post to another by calculating engagement rate. To calculate the engagement rate, we use this formula: likes + comments, divide by total number of followers and then multiply by 100 to get a percentage. At the time this picture was posted, the account had 820 followers, so to calculate the engagement rate we will do the following: 121+1/820*100= 14.87%. Visit IQ rival to find your industry average for engagement rates.
The 65 is the number of interactions this post received (profile visits + website clicks). You will notice that in the text of this post, the user invited their followers to visit a website found on their profile page, so it is important to note that 4 people visited the website after seeing this post. When creating your business account, you can add a link to your website in the bio, but this link can be updated and changed through the profile settings. If you are running the social media for a small boutique, you could change the link in your bio to take users to a landing page that features new arrivals and add a call to action in a post inviting your followers to check out your new fall collection. You will then be able to track how many people visited your website through this individual website analytics for the post.
Another key insight that the analytics show is how people are encountering your content. On this second example you can see that 96 people viewed this post because of hashtags. By tracking which hashtags you use in different post and the number of people who view the post because of the hashtags you will be able to make list of the most effective hashtags that will drive new traffic to your page and introducing them to your brand. If you need ideas for new hashtags to try, there are several online resources to find relevant and trending terms.
There are so many things you can learn from analyzing the insights on your post. Take time to look through your last ten post and learn how people are best interacting with your content.