understanding your insights
In this section we will be talking about the all important Instagram Insights... what they are, what they're for, and how to best use them to your advantage!
First things first, what exactly are insights? Insights are essentially Instagram's very own built in analytics tool. They will be enabled after you switch to a 'business' or 'creator' account, and can be accessed via your profile page when logged in to that account. Insights will show you a lot of different things about your profile and how your posts are performing. We will talk about the different sections and how you use them now.
individual post insights
You can get to this section by clicking 'view insights' on the left side under any of your individual posts! Through this little shortcut, you can see; total interactions from each post, the breakdown of the engagement, and perhaps most interestingly, the breakdown of how people discovered your post! This includes where all your impressions came from: it could be; hashtags, directly through your profile, home feed or other. Take this on board for next time you post! What is working best for you?
building strong relationships
These can be accessed directly by swiping up on your own story and clicking on the analytic graph button. You will be able to see who and how many people viewed and interacted (click next, back, next story, or exit?) with your story, how many impressions the story got, how many accounts were reached with your story, how many follows you got as a result of your story, and (if you have this feature linked), how many people 'swiped up' and viewed your connected URL. This 'swipe up' feature is only available to verified accounts and accounts with over 10,000 followers. Now let's delve deeper into the three sections of Instagram's main insights platform (once you have switched to a business or personal account, this will be located above your story highlights on your own page. Only you can see these insights, and you can only see them for the account that you are logged into. However, there are third-party applications and software that brands can use to find out your insights (so always be honest when telling them!)
main insights
Now let's get into the statistics you will find when you click the 'insights' button on your profile! There are 4 main sections that you'll need to know - Reach, Interactions, Audience, and Content. Follow the diagram to the right to find each page
reach
This section will let you know how many accounts you have reached within a 7 day or 30 day period! Reach simply means how many people have discovered your account! In this section you will also be able to see your impressions. This is different from your reach. Your impressions are simply, the amount of times your content was seen, not by each unique person, but all together!
content interactions
In your interactions section, you'll be able to see exactly how people are interacting with your content - and a complete breakdown on how you are performing with each of the different metrics!
REMEMBER: There is no one metric that is more important than the other - the rumour that 'saves are more important' than other metrics is just that, a rumour.
You should measure your performance across metrics based on what type of account you are. If you are an informative or educational account - then yes saves would be an important metric to look out for, as this gives you the knowledge that your post was informative enough for a person to want to come back to later! This metric may not be
Important however, if your account is not educational or informative! Remember to always think of factors why your metrics might have changed week on week, or month on month. For example: in the screenshot above - my interactions were down 41% from the previous month. This looks pretty drastic - but when I put it into context it makes sense. The previous month, I had run a very successful giveaway - which would have doubled my content interactions! Always make sure you are looking at your insights with context. Just because something has decreased, doesn't necessarily mean you're doing something wrong. It could just be, like this example, circumstancial!
Audience
The Audience tab tells you all about who is following your profile and what demographic brackets they fall into, how active they are, when they are active and how your follow count has changed. Within the Audience tab of Instagram Insights, you’ll find 4 key sets of information about your followers, let's break these down for you now:
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Gender – The percentage split of your followers
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Age Range – The age brackets of your follower
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Top Locations – The locations of your followers based on City and Countries
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Followers – The most active times of your followers, by hour of the day and days of the week
These are important to know as it will help you suss out who is already following you, allowing you to tailor your content a little more to your audience. This is also valuable information when it comes to working with bands - as a brand will most likely want to work with an audience who's demographics match their own target customers!
content
When you click on the 'content' tab of your insights, you will see all the stats relating to your feed posts, story posts, and promotions (if you have run any). This tab allows you to look through your post insights for the last two years (toggle-able by the last week, month, three months, six months, year or two years!), and allows you to sort your insights by twelve different metric types.
what do these different metrics mean?
Calls: The number of accounts that followed a call to action to call you
Comments: number of comments on your post
Emails: The number of accounts that followed a call to action to email you
Engagement: The amount of accounts that Liked, Commented or Saved your post
Follows: The number of accounts that started following you because of your post
Get Directions: The number of users who tapped Get Directions after seeing your post
Impressions: The number of times your post has been seen
Likes: The total amount of likes on your post
Profile Visits: The number of times your profile was viewed as a result of your post
Reach: The number of unique accounts that have saw your posts
Saved: The number of users that saved your post
Website Clicks: The number of times your website was clicked on because of your post
using your insights
Now you know how to check and understand your insights, let's outline the most important things you can use your insights for, in order to perfect your growth, understand your audience, and create even better content!
getting to know your audience
Use your Audience tab to get to know your followers in more depth who are they?
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Use your Audience Insights to learn who to remove. Our audience stats should always be in line with our ideal audience, our niche, and who we want to target. Remember, these are the people who will be seeing your content, so you need to make sure they are the type of people who are actually going to want to see what you are posting. If you are looking to become a successful women's fashion blogger for example, and your statistics are over 50% male - it may be time for a clear out! If you want to target mums with young children, and the majority of your followers are over 55, then we may have a problem! If you're a london blogger - who wants to attract people in London who want to learn about the activities going on - and the majority of your followers are from Mozambique, maybe it's time to re-align. If working with brands is on your list of things you want to achieve as an influencer, remember that they will be looking at this too. Your audience must align with their ideal customers, and the majority of big brands will look into it!
You can also use the audience tab to understand whether you are gaining or losing followers. Whether you did anything on certain days that made your followers spike and whether you can replicate that (in the example above - we spiked when we were featured in a newspaper!) This can also show you whether your current audience is your ideal audience - and if they're not, think about why they might not be. Your content? Who you engage with? Too many bot followers?
making better content
The key to making amazing content that gets killer engagement, reach and lots of love from your existing and new audiences, is to always be evaluating your past content to see how well it has done. The goal is to create more of what your audience reacts well to, and less of what doesn't work for them. Keep in mind that before you use this to, you should ensure that the majority of your audience are your ideal audience. If your audience is not in line with your niche and who you want to attract, then it will be very difficult to tell what you should and should not be creating through insights, as these are not the people that would typically be interested in your content anyway. So what they engage with and how the engage with it is far less intentional.
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Okay now that's out of the way, if most of your audience is in line with your value, purpose and niche, then here's how to tell what to create more of, and what to create less of.
First - work out the most important metric type for your niche and value (it is not saves for everyone!). We typically engage with different types of content in different ways, we might like a photo of a pretty travel photograph, whereas we may save something educational or instructional that we might want to go back to, and so forth. Your own key content metric will depend on what you post. Here are a few examples to get you thinking:
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Educational/Instructional Posts: Saves and Comments
Interior Design Posts: Saves and Likes
Fashion Posts: Likes
Photography: Likes
Inspirational Posts: Likes/Saves
Motivational Posts:
Entertaining Posts: Likes/Shares