How to Use Instagram Insights for Business
Instagram can be a wonderful place to form relationships within your community and inspire them to take action. Not only that, but Instagram offers businesses the opportunity to learn about their followers and use that information to improve their marketing across the board.
The Instagram Insights feature is a very powerful little tool that allows those who have a business account to tap into some basic analytics for free. There are a handful of Instagram analytic tools to choose from. Using this guide and your business goals, you’ll be able to determine which metrics to use and which to ignore within the Insights option.
Turn on Insights
If you’re managing an Instagram account for your business, you probably know about the native analytics option Instagram offers all business accounts, so we’ll just briefly explain how to access them for those who may not be familiar.
- Open your profile and tap on the gear icon to open the options menu.
- Select ‘Switch to a Business Profile’ from the list of options.
- Click through the prompts that tell you a little about the benefits of a business profile.
- Connect your Facebook by selecting from a list of pages you’re an admin on. Pick the page that you want associated with your Business Profile on Instagram.
- From there, you’ll be taken through the setup process for your new business profile and you’ll see the Instagram Insights icon (it looks like a bar graph) in the upper-right hand corner.
Know your metrics
Once you’ve got the Insights feature installed, it’s time to start getting to know your metrics.
The Instagram analytics Insights tool can be broken down into five categories: account based, post based, follower based, metrics based on your stories, and Instagram Live activity. In this article, we will cover the first three to help you get started.
Account based analytics
This view gives a basic dive into the health of your profile over the last seven days compared to the week before.
- Impressions – The total number of times your posts and stories were viewed.
- Reach – The number of unique accounts who viewed your posts and stories.
- Profile views – The number of unique accounts who’ve visited your profile.
- Link clicks – The number of clicks to the link you have in your profile description.
It’s important to note that this data is going to be displayed on a rolling basis, so, to look at longer trends and performance you should record information in a spreadsheet on the same day each week or look into using a more complete Instagram analytics tool that does it for you.
Post based analytics
In this view, you are able to filter your posts by type – all photos, videos, or carousel posts – and sort them by number of impressions, reach, likes, comments, times saved, views and engagement levels for the time period selected.
Spend some time reviewing your posts and how they performed based on different metrics. This will help guide your content going forward and allow you to better understand what kind of things to post about based on how well they’re received.
The post based analytics should be used along with the follower analytics to fine tune your strategy on Instagram. With the two categories together, you will learn a great deal about your audience’s preferences and how to adjust for them.
Follower based analytics
The data on your followers that Instagram provides can be one of the most powerful insights guiding your messaging and content on the platform.
At the top of the screen, you will find a count of current followers and the amount gained or lost over the last seven days. Since Instagram only shows trends over the previous week, you’ll need to use a more powerful tool to track that for you or be diligent about recording data in another place, such as a spreadsheet, each week.
Below that, you’ll see a distribution of followers by gender and age bracket, followed by the top 5 cities and countries where your followers reside.
So far, we’ve seen basic data on followers that may or may not be important depending on your unique business plans and objectives. The bottom of the followers page is where you’ll find Followers – Hours – Days distribution as this is going to be the source of some universally valuable insights.
The Followers – Hours – Days distribution tells you when followers are most active on Instagram. No matter what your business goals might be or reasons for using Instagram for your business, this metric will help get the most out of every post you share.
Using your metrics
You might have a big announcement to make or want to get as much attention for your product launch. Using the data on the specific days that your followers are most active, you can plan ahead and be sure to have everything ready to go on the day that your followers are most active.
“The day metric is particularly useful for teams or when you have more than one person working on creating content and posting content to Instagram,” says John Rampton, the founder of Due and Calendar. “By using the information to set deadlines for when content needs to be ready, you have a quantitative data-driven decision making framework that your team can build around in an orderly fashion.”
The time of each day when followers are most active is going to be extraordinarily useful as well. Since you aren’t able to schedule and share posts directly from management systems like Buffer, you can examine the peak times for each day and set reminders for to share content based on those times.
Let’s get super practical for a second here. Let’s say you’re using Instagram to build awareness around your new clothing line and want to know how well you’ve been doing over the last six months.
In this situation, where the goal is to generate awareness, you’ll want to pay close attention to your reach, profile views, and link clicks (in that order) to determine your progress.
Reach is different from impressions (see above) and will let you know how well posts have been performing against the goal of getting your brand in front of new people. The number of profile views will tell how well your content is doing against the goal of making people interested enough to click over to your profile and learn more. Finally, the link clicks will give insight into how well your account converts followers into prospective customers on your website.
This is a very basic flow of insights that can be determined just from the profile level metrics provided on Instagram Insights. Use this together with your post based performance to determine where there’s room for improvement and where you’re doing well on the platform.
Wrapping it all up
Instagram Insights help businesses learn about their followers, improve their content, and create systems for intelligent decision-making on the platform. Take the time to consider business objectives and apply the right set of metrics to measure performance and make improvements.
Insights can be a great place to get familiarized with Instagram analytics, but it’s only a fraction of the big picture. Once you understand what can be tracked on a basic level, it’s important to start looking into things like hashtag performance and trends over longer periods of time. To do that, consider using a tool like Owlmetrics to help supercharge your Instagram marketing and get the most out of your time and effort on the platform.
We hope you enjoyed the above post in cooperation with Socialnomics!
