When it comes to Instagram marketing, it’s easy to get lost in the whirl of content creation and keeping up with trends. At the end of the day, it’s all about results. You need a way to quantify and understand what exactly all of those Instagram posts and stories are achieving for your business.
In this blog post, we explore 5 ways that you can get a better idea of what exactly is going on in terms of your Instagram marketing success.
1. Keep An Eye On Your Competitors
Instagram Insights breaks down engagement for Instagram business accounts using metrics like:
- Comments
- Likes
- Shares
- Saves
If you want to explore the analytics of a specific post, first open up the post. Then tap on View Insights under the post.
If your post was effective, you will see a lot of engagement in the form of likes, shares, comments, and saves. In order to calculate your engagement rate, you will need to look at these markers when compared to your number of followers.
SEE ALSO: How to Set Up an Instagram Business Account
What Is The Ideal Engagement Rate?
According to an Iconosquare study, the average engagement rate on Instagram is 4.7%. However, this can vary depending on your industry.
Since there is no general Instagram marketing engagement rate that applies to all niches, the best way you can calculate your own success is to compare it to that of those in your field. Find out the average engagement rate of your competitors. Based on that, you will be able to determine how well you are performing.
If you are new to the world of Instagram marketing, you might be wondering how on earth you could possibly know how your competitors are doing. It’s actually quite easy. There are several free influencer earnings calculators that will tell you now only your engagement rate based on recent posts, but the rate of any account you enter.
2. Use The Right Hashtags
Instagram is the most hashtag-friendly social media platform out there. It allows you to truly use hashtags to your biggest advantage. There are many reasons why so many brands are moving to Instagram.
However, unless you are tracking your performance closely, knowing exactly which hashtags to use and what the ones you are using are actually doing for you can be almost impossible.
Instagram Insights is a great place to get started. You will want to get started by taking a look at the Instagram Insights for a single post. Under the Discovery section, you’ll see impressions broken down into a few categories. One of those is “From Hashtags.”
This tells you exactly how many impressions your post got due to the hashtags you chose. You want to use a variety of hashtags on all of your posts to test them against each other. When you do this, you will discover revealing patterns within your insights that can help you level up your Instagram marketing.
Study Engagement Over Time
Over time, you will notice that certain sets of hashtags work better for you and get better results than others. Those are the ones you will want to use again and again and continue to refine.
However, unless you only use one hashtag per post, this might not help you narrow things down enough. If you want even more specific insight, you can use the free Instagram Checkup Tool by Union Metrics. This tool reveals your top hashtags, so you know which ones to use in your Instagram posts and Stories.
3. Figure Out Which Instagram Posts Perform Well and Drive Traffic
Making social media content becomes a lot easier once you know what your audience responds well to. When you track popular content you know what kind of content your audience likes and can make more like that in the future. You can do this using Instagram Insights.
Instagram Insights
You can actually use Instagram Insights to filter popular content for your account. Follow these steps:
- On your business profile, tap the three lines in the top right corner of your business profile.
- Tap Insights.
- On the Content tab, scroll down to posts.
- Tap See All.
By default, Instagram will show you your last year of posts sorted by engagement. Take note of all of the engagement metrics (comments, follows, etc) when figuring out how successful each post has been.
Look at your highest-performing posts and use them to direct future content-creation. This is a big part of Instagram marketing success.
4. Consider Instagram Stories Performance
Instagram Stories is far more popular than many people realize. In fact, it is used by 500 million people every day. Its popularity makes it a great place to study for engagement metrics. It can really help you get a better understanding of how people are interacting with your content.
In order to access your Instagram Stories metrics, scroll down to the Stories section of your Insights page, then tap See All.
While Insights shows data for your posts for a year, it only shows data on your Stories for 14 days. So, you will want to be sure to check it regularly to get the most up-to-date information.
When it comes to Stories, metrics like replies, shares, link clicks, and follows can indicate if your audience is enjoying your content. It also lets you see Stories specific insights such as Exited, Next story, and Forward.
SEE ALSO: How to Get the Most Out of Your Instagram Stories
Look For Patterns To Improve Instagram Marketing
If a user exits out of your story, it means that they are swiping out of it to go back to the Instagram home feed. If they go to the next story, they are choosing to skip yours to see what’s next. Both of these metrics suggest that your Story is failing to connect.
When you look at these analytics you want to try to figure out patterns. Do users exit whenever you upload more than a certain number of segments? Do people stick around more for educational content?
Once you know what interests your followers and what causes them to move on you can make better content to suit them.
5. Track Your Growth
Your follower growth will really tell you whether your content is hitting the right marks. Once you start strategically tailoring content to match the preferences of your audience, of course, you want to make sure you are getting it right.
One thing you can do is manually track your growth. Tools such as Squarelovin can help you get snapshots of your follower count so you can compare them over time.
Squarelovin offers both free and paid options. With the free option, it will calculate your follower count daily so you don’t have to do it yourself. If you choose to sign up, it will track your stats over time and show you your last 7 days of growth.
Manually Tracking Your Growth
Another option you have is to track your growth by hand. You can actually do so with a simple equation.
In order to manually track your growth, you can take your end of the week follower count and subtract your beginning of the week follower count. Then, divide this number by the beginning of the week follower count. To get your rate, multiply that number by 100 to get your growth expressed as a percentage.
Final Thoughts On Instagram Marketing Success
There are many things you can do to grow your Instagram account. There are so many elements to Instagram that, without any direction, you could potentially endlessly tweak things without knowing what is working and what is not. This is why finding patterns in your analytics is so important. It can ground your marketing strategy in reality.
Instagram business accounts have access to great analytics tools right within the app itself. On top of this, there are a number of free tools that can help you get an even deeper look.
Use them to understand your audience’s preferences so you can make stronger content that connects and gets you the results that you want.
Which are some of your favorite brands on Instagram? Comment below…
