Analytics: how to use them on Instagram

With 1 billion users worldwide, Instagram is the biggest social media platform that exists today. It is not just a place where you post pictures anymore, it has become a great place to reach your target audience and build brand awareness as well. It can be difficult to know what works best in terms of content strategy if you haven't first analyzed your growth on Instagram.

Below we will discuss how to use analytics for insights into what type of posts generate engagement so that you know which content you should create in the future. Analytics are important because they help us determine what to do and what not to do. They also help us determine how well we are doing so if you would like to learn how to use analytics, here is a breakdown that explains it all:

Why is Instagram good for marketing?

Instagram is a good place for marketing because your target audience is on the platform and it can generate money if targeted correctly. Instagram is the ideal place to target millennials who have a whopping $1.3 trillion annual purchasing power in the United States alone, making this the group with the largest spending power of any generation. This number is still expected to grow as millennials were expected to make up 50% of the workforce by 2020. These statistics display the potential amount of customers Instagram has at your disposal making it a good place for marketing. Altogether Instagram has 1 billion users which is a beautiful number for anybody looking to market anything. The platform makes it possible for you to gain audience insight in the form of Instagram analytics.

Activity insights

Activity insights on Instagram are how you can track your interactions and discovery. Interactions are the total number of actions taken on your profile and posts for the week which includes profile visits, website clicks, email and call clicks and location clicks. In addition to this, it also tracks which hashtags created the most engagement, so choosing a good hashtag is important. There are now tools that can be used to generate the best hashtags, such as TaskAnt, which gives you options to get trending hashtags. Discovery on the other hand is your impressions and reach. Impressions are how many times your post has been seen for the week and reach is the number of accounts that have seen your posts within the week.

Activity insights are helpful because they inform you about your followers and how well your content is being received by your audience. It's also a good way to track engagement.

Know your audience

Instagram also makes it possible for you to get to know your demographic through audience analytics. These analytics will inform you about the top location, age range as well as gender of your audience. You will also have access to your follower hours which tells you the average time of day your demographic are on Instagram as well as follower days which tell you the days of the week that your audience is most active.

Knowing your audience is very helpful because you get to know who is on the receiving end of your content and allows you to tailor your content as well as posting times according to the information you receive.

See what kind of posts work

Analytics is a great way to see which posts are popular and which aren't. You can discover this information by looking at analytics for Instagram feed, stories, reels and IGTV. Looking at these analytics individually will give you a better understanding of which posts are most popular and which posts you should be posting. Knowing these analytics is very helpful because it will tell you which types of posts you should focus on based on their success rate amongst your followers, which helps to get more Instagram followers. For example, if reels show more engagement than normal feed posts then you know to post more reels.

Increase brand awareness

Lastly, we are going to discuss how you can use analytics to increase brand awareness on Instagram. To do this you simply need to focus on the following metrics:

• Follower count: The more followers you have means more brand awareness.
• Impressions: The more people who see your stories and posts the better for your brand or business.
• Reach: Tracks the number of views on your stories, posts and your account. Growing your Instagram reach is an important part of growing brand awareness.