Instagram Insights 101

From our sister site over at Arts Spark

 

Instagram is currently one of the most popular social media interfaces. The photo and video sharing tool is especially popular among 18-29 year olds. It also happens to be a very useful tool for branding and self-promotion for businesses.

Instagram has introduced a feature made specifically for brands and businesses, which allows business accounts to sign up for an Instagram Business profile. This gives account owners access to valuable demographic and user activity information that can be used to step up their Instagram game and really target their audiences the correct way. Business account managers can also get specific data on Impressions, Reach and Engagement of a particular post, as opposed to the general interaction level of the account as a whole.

Features such as Insights and optimized Ad management are the perks of having an Instagram Business account. The Insights offer a look into not only how browsers view the business account’s content – i.e. when followers are online, how many impressions the account’s main page had in any given week, but also who those users are with comprehensive follower demographics such as age, gender and location.

Insights allow the account owners to see:

• Impressions: Total number of times your post or story was seen
  • Comparing Impressions to “Engagement” (the number of people who liked or commented on a post) is useful because it allows a user to see how many people saw a particular post and chose not to like it. For example, if the latest picture on your photography account has 95 likes but received 1,000 impressions, perhaps there is something telling in the type of content your followers want to see from you and that they just didn’t feel strongly about the content of your latest post.
• Reach: Number of unique accounts who saw your post or story
  • This is a helpful tool to determine if you’re posting at the right time, tagging the right accounts or using the right hashtags.
• Website Clicks: Number of accounts that have tapped the website link on your Business Profile
• Follower Activity: Average times your followers are on Instagram on a typical day (and generalized demographics of gender, age range, and top locations by city or country)
  • This tool is perhaps the most useful tool of the bunch – Identifying your online market via Instagram’s demographics provides valuable information that can be used to either alter or solidify your online strategy. It also gives you a day-by-day hourly breakdown of what time your followers are most active – in a histogram format. When you click on the small chart icon in between your handle and settings on your profile page and scroll down to the “Followers” histogram you’ll be able to determine which time is the best to amass the most likes and interactions on your account. For example, you may discover that you need to change your posting strategy because on Mondays your followers are most active at 5pm, but on Tuesday your followers are most active at 9pm.
• Video Views: Number of times your video was viewed for 3 or more seconds
• Saves: The number of unique accounts that saved your post

Stories

Business accounts that use the “stories” feature can take advantage of Instagram Business’ insights on past stories (within 24 hours), which offer the statistics seeing “Replies” – the number of times viewers use the “Send Message” option presented on a business account’s story. The feature also shows the details of story “Exits” – tallying the number of times viewers swiped out of a story to view that of another account or to exit to their feed.

Conclusion

With the astronomical amount of users and content on Instagram, getting noticed as a business or artist can be a challenging feat. Instagram ‘s (~free~) business insights provide audience and engagement information that is absolutely crucial for any business to consider when scheduling or producing Instagram content. Watch for a future post on how you can use this information to improve your Instagram engagement.

Sources:
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/788388387972460?helpref=faq_content#
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1717645641840196?helpref=faq_content#
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/897631030335607
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1533933820244654?helpref=related&ref=related#
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/788388387972460
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1798596623796622?helpref=page_content
https://business.instagram.com/blog/bringing-insights-and-ads-to-stories/