If you want to grow your Instagram Account organically, taking a look at your Instagram analytics is the perfect place to start. Your Instagram analytics helps you discover what works, let go of what doesn’t, and tweak your content strategy so that you speak to the right audience.
If you’re still new to Instagram Analytics, I suggest you read this post first where I touch on the basics of how it works. In this post, I’ll be going into depth on how the metrics work, how to use these metrics to your advantage and how to adjust your content strategy accordingly.
What metrics are the most important to track?
The metrics you focus on the most are determined by your goals for your Instagram Account. Without goals, your analytics simply remain a bunch of numbers. When you have goals in place, you can use these numbers to create content that will achieve these goals.
There are namely three kinds of goals on Instagram:
- Building brand awareness
- Building a community
- Generating leads and sales
Goal #1: Building Brand Awareness
If your goal is to get your name out there and have as many people as possible discover your account, these are the metrics you’ll be focusing on:
- Your Follower Count: Knowing your follower growth metrics is a valuable tool you can use to create your content strategy. Take a look at what days you’ve received the most followers and what you posted on those days.
- Impressions: This refers to the number of times your posts have been seen during a specific time frame. The more people who see your posts and stories, the better!
- Reach: Reach refers to unique accounts that view your content (not the same account viewing your Instagram post multiple times).
- Video Views – Instagram is progressively prioritizing video content, which is why video views are rising in importance as well. The more views you gain, the more exposure your account gets.
Adjusting your content strategy
- Go through your analytics and observe which posts are bringing the most followers, impressions and reach. These are the kinds of posts you’d want to replicate and repeat throughout your content strategy
- Begin to incorporate growth strategies into your content strategy. Social Clout Club can help you increase your impressions, reach and followers with our specific growth packages. Click here to see our growth packages!
- Create a list of hashtags and each month test out a certain group of hashtags. See which one’s bring in the most impressions, reach and following. (Click here to get access to the ultimate hashtag strategy!).
Goal #2: Building a Community
There’s a reason why being social is the core foundation of social media. Instagram is the perfect place to meet new people, connect, and build an interactive community around similar interests. If this is your main goal, then you need to be continuously monitoring, responding, and evaluating the following metrics:
- Comments: A community talks. What better way to do this than by having a conversation on your posts?
- Story Replies: Stories are a great tool to use if you’re trying to engage with followers to create a community. If your story viewers are taking the time to reply, this is a great sign.
- Engagement: Engagement is critical when it comes to community building. Focus on saves, shares and likes.
Adjusting your content strategy
- Reply to all comments under your posts with thoughtfulness and intentionality. Never ignore a comment and don’t just like it either. The comment section is the perfect place to respond and engage with your audience. (Read here on how to write a comment that creates deep connections on Instagram).
- Create stories that encourage engagement by using stickers and giving your audience the opportunity to vote, participate in polls or ask you questions.
- Create posts that are high in value which people want to share to their stories or save for future reference.
Goal #3: Generating leads and sales
If you’re running your Instagram account as a business, you’d want to see how profitable your account is and how you can increase your profits using your content and marketing strategies.
There are the metrics you need to focus on:
- Website clicks: Tracking how many people click on your link in your bio (or the links you add in the Swipe Up Feature) indicates how many people are interested in more of what you have to offer.
- Call clicks/email clicks: Booking calls or sending emails show that people are warm leads and they’re actively interested which stand a good chance of becoming conversions.
- Shopping tags: When you tag products on your posts and add product stickers on your stories, you’ll be able to view insights on how people interact with your shopping content. These insights will give you a good indication of how interested people are in what you have to offer.
Adjusting your content strategy
- Make it easy for people to find your website as well navigating your website. The basic principle stands: people don’t like to struggle. Simplify the process as much as possible
- Add a way for your audience to book a call or email so that you can utilize these metrics
- Add shopping tags to every post you create that features a product your selling to keep track of your audience’s response and online behavior.
Other important metrics to keep in mind:
- What days and times they’re most active: This directly impacts your engagement. If they’re not online, they won’t be active and they won’t engage.
- What their ages are: Some content is more focused on certain generations than others. Keep your audience’s age in mind when creating your content strategy.
- What’s their gender: If your audience is predominantly male, promoting feminine hygine or maternal products might not be the way to go. It’s important that you know excatly who they are so that you can speak to them directly.
In Conclusion
When creating your content strategy, first determine what your goals are. Do you want to build brand awareness, build a community or generate leads/sales? Based on this you can start to analyze your analytics and create content accordingly.
