Over one billion individuals worldwide use Instagram, and they spend an average of 28 minutes every day on the app. That’s a lot of time and plenty of people to reach for your marketing aspirations.
However, without Instagram analytics, your marketing efforts might be for nothing. If you want to grow your Instagram account, looking through your Instagram analytics or Insights is the best place to start.
Instagram data can help you track the progress of your social media goals, proving what’s working and what’s not. It can also help you target the right audience, develop a good content strategy, and reach new audiences.
For some people, The different Instagram metrics and terms can be difficult to understand. And that’s why you need this guide.
This article will explain the basics of Instagram metrics, share details on some Instagram analytics tools, and show you why you need to track your likes, followers, and views.
What is Social Media Analytics?
Social media analytics involves gathering and analyzing data points that enable you to track and measure the performances of your social media accounts.
Your analytics breaks down your comments, likes, shares, and saves as garnered by each post you make.
Numbers, they say, don’t lie. It’s one thing to think you’re a social media whiz, and it’s another to have evidence that you truly are. Hence, the emphasis on the significance of social media analytics.
Analytics truly show you whether or not your marketing efforts are effective. Therefore, they are very crucial to any successful campaign or brand strategy.
These metrics help you assess your social media marketing strategy on both macro and micro levels. They can also help you understand your customers’ sentiments, spot trends, and help avoid PR crises before they happen.
To achieve all these, you will need social media analytics tools. These tools will help you develop performance reports to share with your team and figure out your strengths and weaknesses in marketing.
Note that Instagram offers the opportunity for account owners to see their analytics through a special feature. They’ve named this tool “insights.” However, this feature is only available to owners of business accounts.
As much as analytics tools can help, it’s also a good idea to monitor your growth and audience participation by practicing social listening.
Why You Should Track Your Comments, Likes, and Views
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To Understand Your Audience More
Instagram analytics is the most valuable tool for understanding your audience. Tracking your likes, views, and comments will let you know when your followers are most active and what type of content they engage with frequently.
Design an Effective Content Strategy
With all the information you gather from your account’s insights, you can develop a content strategy that generates positive results for your brand or business. Without such analysis, you work in the dark and depend on assumptions.
Track Your Goals and Growth
Understanding and clarifying your goals is the first step to getting more from your Instagram Analytics. You know what to look out for and what to dismiss in your social media reporting when you have clear objectives.
Most businesses or brands have their own peculiar goals, from growing follower counts to increasing comments and likes. Your analytics show you when you’ve hit those goals and what to do better when you’ve not.
How To Check Instagram Analytics Using Instagram Insights
As we mentioned earlier, to access Instagram Insights on the IG app, you need to operate a business account. Once you have your business account, follow these steps to check your analytics with the insights tool.
- Go to your Instagram profile
- Click on the three horizontal lines at the top right corner of your screen.
- Various buttons will pop up. Click on the Insights option. This will open the analytics for your business profile.
What You Should Know About Tracking Social Media Analytics
It may seem difficult at first, but tracking your social media analytics gets easier with practice. However, you need to do some planning and maintain maximum consistency. Here are other things to note.
1. Have a Clear Goal and Strategy.
Like any other goal, a social media goal has to be precise and realistic. It must capture the exact things you want to achieve with your marketing activity. And remember, goals can be short-term or long-term.
When you have concrete goals, you tend to work towards them. Plus, they’ll help you measure how effective your efforts have been. As such, you may want to set some hard numbers or indicators to make success attainment clear.
For instance, you could set a goal to gain 20k new followers in the next 2 months or get 5k views on your next video. The key is to make your goals as easy to measure as possible. These goals must be time-bound to ensure that you work toward them.
The final step is to make sure your goals are relevant and attainable. It is best to start slow and set up more difficult goals as you progress. You also have to make sure your goals fit into your overall plan. Each of your marketing goals must benefit your brand or business in specific ways.
After using these processes to create and select your goals, you can now use these other tips to track your social media analytics.
2. Decide Which Metrics Are Important
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This is usually the first thing people worry about when tracking their social media analytics. No metric is particularly more important than the other, and only you decide which is most necessary for your brand or business.
It’ll help to remember the goals you set and let them determine the metrics that matter the most for your business.
For example, if your goal is to increase engagement on your Instagram account, your comments and likes matter more than your followers.
Social media metrics typically consist of four elements:
volume
This refers to the number of individuals chatting on social media about your brand (or content). What is the size of the conversation surrounding your brand? Is there a lot of buzz about your service or customer experience? How many people are mentioning and Hash-tagging you? These are the kinds of questions that volume can help you answer.
Reach
While volume refers to the number of people talking about you, reach refers to the number of individuals who have seen your posts. As a result, reach is a good measure of the size of your potential audience. It determines how widely your content and messages are shared on social media.
Engagement
By far, the most significant social media statistic is engagement. This metric tracks how people react to your brand and content across all social media platforms. Engagement refers to how many people interact with your posts, reels, and stories. Comments, likes, and shares, for example, are used to measure engagement on Instagram. If your engagement is low, refresh your Instagram bio with a new photo, creative font, or a memorable quote.
Conversion
Your conversion rate is supposed to show how effective your engagement is. Conversion covers the number of visitors who take action on your page.
For example, how many people subscribed to your newsletter, bought a product, or register for something after clicking on a link in your post?
A high conversion rate indicates that your content is valuable and engaging to your intended audience. It’s a sign that your post was relevant. To put it another way, your brand delivered on its promise.
3. Check-in Regularly
It is important to always monitor your analytics. Collect Periodic Instagram analytics reports to ensure you are on the right track.
4. Pay Attention to Report Fluctuations
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After learning the art of continuous tracking and reports, it’s time to analyze the analytics. Though the insights provide information about what happens on your profile, it is left for you to interpret what they mean for your business.
Search for spikes and drops in your numbers, and then evaluate why those anomalies happened.
5. Employ Third-Party Tools
Technology is your ally when it concerns social media analytics. Sometimes, you may require better and deeper analytics of your account’s performance. That’s why third-party tools come in.
The native analytics aren’t available for download or sharing because they’re only available on mobile devices. So, the feature is quite limited.
However, monitoring progress with a third-party tool can be much smoother. There are several tools out there that’ll help make sense of your different social media reports and data.
The right social media analytics tools can help you simplify analysis and make you arrive at your conclusions faster. These tools can help provide answers to questions like:
- What were our most-liked posts on Instagram this month?
- Which social media network had the most engagement on our website this month?
- Do followers comment more on photo posts or video posts?
Bottom Line
Tracking your Instagram analytics over time provides a better idea of the content form that helps achieve your marketing goals.
Whatever your approach to Instagram analytics, understanding how your content performs can be significant for your content strategy.
Don’t be afraid to experiment. Experiment with your tactics by changing your content, and see what works. The results are often insightful and game-changing.