Instagram is a critical part of many brands’ social media strategy. Until recently, it’s been difficult to track the rate of change and improvement with your Instagram account. Instagram analytics provide insight into who your followers are, when they’re active online, and how many people view each post.
These insights are valuable to understand who your followers are and what posts drive the most engagement. Finding out what content is working the best -- from videos to hashtags -- can help you shape your social media strategy on Instagram. With the right social media management tools, you can track analytics on Instagram and find the best ways to drive engagement with your customers.
Using Instagram analytics tools to measure the metrics of your posts can help you leverage the results and drive engagement. Learning about the demographics and behavior of your brand’s audience helps you create relevant and timely posts. The free Instagram Analytics are part of Instagram Business accounts and help brands see what content gets the most engagement, beat the Instagram algorithm, learn the best times to publish, find brand influencers, and predict user engagement. The best Instagram analytics for business tools provide additional insight into your Instagram account and its followers, providing your brand with the information it needs to boost engagement.
What are Instagram Analytics?
The key metrics your brand should collect from the Instagram platform are:
Follower demographics: Business Instagram users can use follower demographics to track the age, gender, and geography of the people who are viewing, liking, and sharing a post. Geography can be especially important to find out if your viewers are in your home country.
Audience growth: tracking the amount of people that follow you and that you follow over a specific period. This allows you to track whether your brand is gaining followers and at what rate.
Engagement: With the engagement feature, you can see how many people interacted with a particular post by day, week, month, etc. With the available charts, you can also see the number of comments, likes, and shares and the percentage of engagement over time.
Hashtag Statistics: Users can view which hashtags were the most popular -- overall and by individual post. Instagram lists the hashtags that were used the most and the ones that drew the most engagement.
Top posts: Instagram keeps a record of your account’s top post. You can view the lifespan of the post as well as what percentage of your audience is engaging with a particular post.
Instagram Analytics Tools
With Pixlee TurnTo’s (now Emplifi's) Instagram Social Analytics, you’ll get an overview of the top metrics for your Instagram business accounts, broken down to show both daily and total counts. With the report updated daily, this feature enables you to easily switch between social analytics for your Instagram business accounts, so every handle is accounted for in your reports. What’s more – you can export the report as a PDF file and change the date range to make the report easily shareable.
Pixlee TurnTo offers a multitude of valuable insights for your brand's team, including:
Total Posts - made with your account
Followers - amount gained and lost
Engagement - total number of likes and comments
Engagement Rate- total number of likes and comments divided by followers divided by posts
Profile Views - total number of users who have viewed your account
Website Views - total number of taps on the website link in the account’s profile
Impressions - total number of times the account's media objects have been viewed
Reach - total number of times the account's media objects have been uniquely viewed
Make your Instagram account more data-driven with the metrics that are most important to you.
There are also several free tools out there to help you track and leverage Instagram’s insights in addition to the ones within the app.
Locowise: The Instagram Analyzer from Locowise offers a quick overview of your Instagram account and performance. It provides basic metrics that help you track follower growth and engagement.
Social Rank: Social Rank’s follower-central service, allows you to filter your brand’s followers based on location, keyword, most engaged, and other criteria, allowing you to plan future content based on your follower demographics.
Union Metrics: Union Metrics’ free tool uses an algorithm that helps brands find the best time to post on Instagram. It also provides metrics on which hashtags to use, what content performs best, and which of your followers are your top fans.
Squarelovin: Squarelovin is a free desktop tool that provides key analytics such as likes and comments, the best-performing content and times to post, demographics and followers, and even the Instagram filters that work best for engagement. You can see analytics overall and for specific posts.
How brands can use Instagram Analytics
By themselves, analytics don't do anything to help market and develop a brand. Being able to generate insights and stories from data is the mark of a truly effective marketer. Here are three easy ways to derive business value from Instagram analytics:
Celebrate customer stories
Once you've started to track Instagram followers and have identified key brand evangelists posting about and celebrating your brand—Share it! Publish user-generated content (UGC) back to Instagram from your own brand handle, on your website, or in an email campaign. There is no more powerful way to articulate a brand, product, or service than through real customer stories — 92% of consumers trust earned media more than any other form of advertising.
Amplify your social media influencers
4.7% of your customers will generate 100% of your word of mouth. In a social world where your most influential customers often have global reach, those individuals matter now more than ever. As Influencer Marketing becomes a larger initiative for marketing teams, being able to quickly discover and connect with influential consumers and potential brand ambassadors already talking about your brand is essential.
So don't just measure the reach of your customer conversation, engage with customers and amplify the conversation from your own brand channels. People love being able to have 1:1 interactions with the brands they love and are way more likely to continue to engage and promote your brand once you create that two-way conversation.
Influence omnichannel content
Instagram is the social media platform with the highest level of brand engagement by a significant margin. This makes it not only a great relationship platform, but also a powerful way to identify trends in the type of message and content that is resonating with consumers. Too often social is treated as a separate channel from the rest of marketing. The relatively high velocity of content and customer interaction on Instagram make it a great way to test different messages and types of creative. Don't let these engagement metrics sit in a CSV somewhere on your laptop-- use your Instagram insights to inform your brand's positioning across all your marketing channels.
With Pixlee TurnTo, Radio Flyer features both top-performing UGC and brand-owned Instagram content in a shoppable gallery on-site.
Every day, a marketer’s world expands with new channels, platforms, and technologies. Understanding Instagram’s analytics is important for brands so that they can identify the strengths and weaknesses of their social media strategy. By tracking follower demographics, top posts, and social media influencers, your brand can figure out what your main audience is and how to best target them. Follower growth and engagement help your brand to calibrate its social media strategy and to identify the best type of content to post and share.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on pixlee.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
