Understand your audience, learn what motivates them and develop a strategy that resonates with your audience, lead to click-throughs, and foster a relationship with your customer.
As of April 2020, there were 120 million active users in the United States on Instagram . Globally, 1 Billion. Being that there are a billion users on Instagram, the platform holds a lot of valuable information about your customer, your content, and your brand.
Leading countries based on Instagram audience size as of July 2020
But how do you use this information to your advantage to grow your business? First, let's start off with the basics.
Understanding Instagram Insights
Instagram has held its data close to the chest when it comes to sharing data with third-party platforms. The only place to gather all of your relevant data and insights in on the mobile app. You can use a third-party platform to unlock your insights on a web browser, but for the sake of time and accuracy, I'm going to walk you through the in-app analytics.
Through the app insights, you can learn about your followers and content. More importantly, the data will tell you what resonates with your audience and potential customers, what doesn't, and when the best time to post, but understanding the basics will get you to a place where you can use the insights to drive action.
So let me break it down for you. The insights tab is categorized into three sections; Activity, Content, and Audience.
Content
Under the content section, you will see an overview of your page, including the number of posts and stories posted during the week and how well your posts, stories, and promotions are performing. Here you can filter by metric (reach, engagement, impression, etc.), type, or date and use this information to see what kinds of content resonates best with your followers. You'll get 2 years' worth of data on posts and two weeks on stories. Pro Tip: Set a weekly reminder to grab all the data you need.
If you see that your stories are driving big impressions, more then posts, or even promoted posts, it may be worth experimenting more with your stories then in-feed content.
Activity
Under the activity tab, you will learn the actions people take when interacting with your page.
Interactions:
Profile visits: The number of times your profile was viewed.
Website clicks: The number of times the website link in your bio was tapped.
Directions: The number of times people selected get directions to your business location.
Discovery:
Reach: The number of unique accounts that have seen your post and stories. *This number is an estimate – it may not be exact.
Impressions: The number of times your posts and stories were seen. Total views.
You'll see a weekly graph showing reach and interactions, use this information to help develop your posting schedule.
Audience
Discover valuable insights about your followers, customers, or potential customers. What type of people does your content attract, how can you use that to your advantage, and ultimately, does it align with your business goals?
Top Locations: Places where followers are centralized.
Follower growth: How your audience has grown over the last 7 days.
Age range
Gender
What hours they are most active: Average times your followers are on Instagram on a typical day.
What days they are most active: Days of the week your followers are most active.
Use this information to create content that will resonate with your customer demographic and drive engagement.
So How Can You Put These Insights To Work?
Now you know the basics of the insights tab on Instagram, so let's make these numbers work do you can drive a valuable impact on your business.
Reach vs. Engagement
This will always be a hot topic, what is engagement, and how is this number defined on Instagram? With likes slowly being removed from the platform, it's becoming more and more challenging to utilize engagement as a driving metric.
Reach tells you how valuable your content is. It shows you how many unique accounts have seen your content and, therefore, how much awareness and value you are gaining amongst your following. If you want to grow your brand awareness, focus on reach.
If you have a post that didn't hit as high of a reach as your other posts, take a look at what you did differently? Did you test different hashtags, was your call to action optimized, did you post at a different time? Use these insights to fine-tune your content, this is where you find value and grow your awareness.
Engagement
As I mentioned above, engagement is not as popular as it was because likes are starting to be removed in certain countries. While likes are still measurable in the US, you can use the engagement rate to continue to measure how well your followers and customers are responding to your content.
Ask any Social Media professional, and the engagement rate calculation will vary, even with my own experience in working with Facebook partners, the calculation changed every year. But the most popular calculation is:
** Engagement is different for video. People will continue to engage with a video buy watching it, not necessarily liking. Use reach and comments as a metric in determining the success of a video post.
Saves
Saves are the new way to measure engagement, they're your golden ticket. So, if you're looking for unique insight to drive strategy, this is it!
A save is when a user collects and stores a post with the bookmark button in the bottom right-hand corner of your post. This is so important because saves are bonus points when it comes to the Instagram algorithm. Instagram will share your post with more people, the more saves you have.
How do you apply this knowledge? Take a look at the posts in your feed, which ones have been saved? All of them? Even better! Which ones have the most saves? Use that information to see what type of content resonates with your followers and use this to develop your strategy.
Stories
It's hard to continually create content on your stories to stay relevant and maintain the interest of your audience. Holding their attention from start to finish is even more difficult. So how can you use the above metrics to develop a successful strategy on your stories? Determine where you lose your viewers. As Queen B says, "If everything was perfect, you would never learn, and you would never grow." So how do you grow?
Completion rate. The percentage of viewers that watch the entire length of the slide. Instagram doesn't give you this, but thankfully, Later does.
Watch through Rate. How many people watched through from the first slid to the last.
Drop off rate. Your first slide has to hook the viewer into watching the rest of the slides, so how do you determine how engaging your first slide is?
Benchmark your stories with these calculations and watch your engagement soar!
With these essential tips, you can begin to understand your audience. You'll start to learn about motivates them – from this vantage point, you can start to develop a strategy that resonates with your audience, lead to click-throughs, and foster a relationship with your customer.