If you are a business owner in the modern world, then you are probably using social media at every turn to promote your business. If you do not already, then it is time to create an Instagram Business account.
This article is for those who have already created an Instagram business account. In this article, you will read about using the insights provided from Instagram to analyze the way your business account is (or is not) helping the actual business.
Insights from Instagram Explained
Instagram uses data and analysis to provide users a whole bunch of information about the different users who view, interact with, and utilize the information posted to their feeds. This data is extremely beneficial for the tech-savvy Instagram user who knows how to use it. For the rest of us? We can use articles like this one to make better use of this tool.
Finding Instagram Insights is easy, but you do need to make sure that your account is a business account. If you have a personal account, then you will need to change to a business account first. Only posts that are made after your account is labeled as business will be able to provide you with any data. Once you make the switch to a business account, you probably do not want to switch back to a personal account. You will lose all of the information gathered by Instagram if you do.
There are several ways to access data from the Insights portion of Instagram. The easiest way to do so is to navigate to the icon that looks like a bar graph on the main screen of your account.
You can also view data for a single post by going to that post and selecting “view insights” as it appears on the lower left of the post.
If you want specific information for a story you posted to Instagram, you can see that by viewing the story and selecting the names that appear in the lower left.
From the main screen of the insights page, you can see a lot of information. This includes summary information for posts created in the past seven days, as well as your current number of followers, and new followers earned in the past week.
There is also summary information for comparing your number of posts created since opening your account to the number in the last week. Further down the page, there are a series of infographics that visually represent the number of impressions, views, and conversions your business has seen in the past week’s time.
Accessing your insights on Instagram is the easy part. Learning what to do with that information, on the other hand, is the more important part.
Step 1
From the main screen of your insights page, you can navigate to the “followers” tab. Here, you will see summary information about the people that follow you. This information is pretty standard, but you will need to have 100 or more followers in order for this to populate.
You can also tap any of the data to see graphs that go into more detail about each of the sections. The sections are gender, age, locations (by major city and country), times active online.
You can use summary information like this to gain insight into which types of people are most interested in your content. This type of information is helpful for targeted ads because you can select certain demographics when you pay for an ad on Instagram.
Further, understanding the times of day that users are most active on the Instagram platform can help you make targeted decisions about when to post certain types of content on your social media pages. This information can help you maximize the effectiveness of your Instagram business account.
Step 2
In addition to understanding your audience, Instagram insights allows you to gain an understanding of how each post is performing. This is extremely beneficial information for planning future content.
You can look at information for several posts on one screen, or if you prefer, you can look at very detailed information about a single post at a time.
From the main screen of the insights page, select “posts.” Here, you can see the three most recently created postings. If you want to see posts created before then, simply click see more at the bottom of this list.
The posts page under insights will automatically display a total count of impressions for the past calendar year. However, looking at more specific data is easy. You can filter the information by using the blue tabs at the top of the page. Simply navigate through each one to view information about the label.
Using these filters can give you valuable information about whether or not you are reaching your goals. Similarly, this information will clearly show you which posts get the most engagement and which ones are duds.
You can also view information about how your ad campaigns are performing on this page. This data is extremely beneficial as it can clearly show you how your money spent is or is not benefiting you on Instagram. This will also give you a clear idea of which posts to spend money to promote and which ones to simply let get discovered on their own. You will learn about your audience preferences by playing around on the insights page.
You can also look at information for single posts underneath the same tab. You can find information about how that post is performing by viewing the metrics for that particular post. Simply open it and then view the insights using the button in the left bottom of the post.
You can use the section titled actions to understand what users did after seeing that particular post on their feed. For example:
- If a User Viewed your profile
- If a user decided to follow your feed
- If a user decided to click to your website
These are extremely beneficial statistics for running a successful business. You can understand which posts move people to follow more content that you post, which posts were interesting enough to entice a user to view your page, and most importantly which posts actually gained interest in leaving Instagram to look at your website.
Further, you can also gain valuable information about where the users saw an individual post in the first place.
- Did the user see the post while scrolling through their feed?
- Did the user search for one of the keywords found in your post?
- Did the user see your post by first looking at your profile?
- Did the user find the post from using the location tab?
- Did the user search for a hashtag that you included in the post?
- Or, did the user see the post from some other method like a share or a tag?
All of this information is extremely beneficial in determining the effectiveness of your content on Instagram.
Step 3
Looking at data for your Instagram stories is equally important to look at data for content that is posted directly to your feed. You can see this information in the same way that you can see your feed information. Simply visit the main page for insights and select stories instead of posts.
From the main page, you can see data for two weeks prior for stories posted. However, from here you cannot see information for the individual stories posted.
You can, however, navigate through the blue links to see which users are or are not interested in the content you have posted to your story. The insights page will tell you very specifically what users did when they looked at your page.
This data can give you some very specific information regarding which stories are important to your customers and which stories are a waste of your time. Use this data to inform your future planned stories and content.
If you want to look at information for a specific story, you can do that by opening the story up. Simply look for the tab that says “seen by” in the lower left corner of the screen. Here, you can see which users have viewed your story and what each user decided to do once they opened it up. This includes actions like replying, exiting, and clicking on tagged accounts.
Step 4
Perhaps the most important data to come out of the insights on Instagram is understanding what happens with the money you spend on Instagram paid ads and promotions.
This can be accessed straight from the main page of the Instagram Insights tab. You can see which promotions are still active and you can also create a new ad campaign from this site.
Looking at your promotions you have run previously, you can see information regarding what that promotion did for your business. Insights will tell you if the promotion prompted someone to visit your profile, like your page, comment on the post etc.
This data helps you understand how your ads are converting to more engagement for your business. It can also help you understand how to spend money on ads on Instagram in the future.
Final Thoughts
Instagram insights are a no cost to you goldmine of information. Best of all, you can access everything mentioned in this article right from the palm of your hand.