So, you’ve started an Instagram Business profile but are you making the most of the Instagram Insights?
Social media and data go hand in hand but, time and time again, we see that people are not checking their insights to get a deeper understanding of their audience.
This type of data allows you to measure the impact your social media strategy is having on your marketing and make cross-channel comparisons. Examples include the variance in age range by channel, the time of day you should be posting or the type of content that performs well.
You might already be familiar with Facebook insights, Twitter and Google Analytics – and Instagram Insights are just as important.
First of all, make sure your Instagram profile is a business profile (this can be found in your settings), as this will allow you access to the insights listed below. There are two key ways to view your insights. You can see an overall portrayal of how your page has been performing recently or you can see the insights for each post and story that you’ve posted.
IMPRESSIONS
The number of times your post has appeared on users’ feeds is something to monitor and compare over time. A gradual increase over time would indicate your content is of interest.
REACH
The number of unique users that have seen your post is also something to watch over a longer period of time. You are likely to see spikes where one post has out-performed your average, but seeing your reach increase consistently would mean your account is growing well.
ACTIONS
View your overall profile visits and how many actions (e.g. likes or comments) were taken on your profile and posts in the selected time period.
When viewing actions of specific posts, this is extremely helpful to indicate how many users did something as a result of seeing that particular post, such as visiting your website or becoming a follower.
DISCOVERY
When viewing your profile’s insights, Discovery will show you the reach and impressions from the last week as well as a comparison with the previous week.
If you want to know how users found a specific post then this is the thing you need to check. It will show the total number of impressions but also the exact place on Instagram it was seen – this could be home, profile, explore or other. From this, you’ll see where your post was seen as the most popular and how many users weren’t already following your account at the time.
FOLLOWERS
This insight shows who your audience is as well as monitoring the amount of people following and unfollowing your page. Just like Facebook, you can get a gender percentage breakdown, age range and the top locations by city and country.
But what is really interesting in this section is seeing the breakdown by hour and day of when your followers are on Instagram in a typical day and when they are most active.
STORIES
We’ve already covered off impressions and reach for your profile and its posts and the same also applies to your stories.
The difference here depends on the nature of the format:
- Taps forward reflects the number of times users tap to skip to the next piece in your story
- Taps back reflects the number of times users tap to see the previous piece in your story
- Replies is the number of times people messaged your account from your story
- Swipe away reflects the number of times users tap to skip your story and view the next account’s story
- Exits is the number of times a user leaves the stories section and returns to home
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