Important Instagram Data or Analytics Marketers Need to Collect for Success
Instagram is a highly versatile platform and is considered to be a marketing powerhouse that works effectively for your brand or business. Instagram offers a few useful features like Instagram ads, stories, and newsfeed that prove beneficial for your business and assist you in accomplishing your marketing goals. Data collection is crucial if businesses wish to succeed in the long run. They can use important Instagram analytics for business success.
According to the Search Engine Journal, it can be pretty challenging to go about collecting information and data, determining the metrics to prioritize, or coming up with a coherent and comprehensible way. Fortunately, today businesses have easy access to an arsenal of data analytics tools that could go a long way in providing accurate information relating to the relevant metrics.
It’s just another typical day as a social media manager at the office. You start responding to Tweets, scheduling Facebook posts, and uploading a few photos from last night’s company dinner on Instagram. So one of the executives walks up to you and says, “I need you to report on our progress on Instagram over the last three months.” You reply, “sure, no problem.” But once he leaves, you’re left thinking,
“what information do I put in the report?”
If this sounds familiar to you, you are not alone. With social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and even Pinterest, you have plenty of metrics to measure the success of your campaigns. But with Instagram, it’s not that simple.
Although the company is taking steps to make the app more marketer-friendly, it hasn’t quite reached that point yet. Fortunately, there are some Instagram metrics you can (and should) monitor to gauge your efforts.
Here are some of the key Instagram analytics for mastering your Instagram marketing game.
Know All About Your Targeted Audience
Understanding and knowing all about your customers and potential customers is the secret to accomplishing your marketing goals! You need to know your audience well while generating engaging or interactive content, improving sales, or establishing the overall customer experience. Once you know your customer well, you will be successful in coming up with a better product for winning a competitive edge.
Instagram analytics proves helpful in breaking down your targeted audience or clients by their age group, demographics, location, and gender. You could use this valuable information or data for focusing your Instagram marketing campaign specifically in these areas.
Instagram analytics involve in-depth analysis and helps you in understanding specifically what your customer sentiment is and what they want most. You have the option of leveraging this valuable data for coming up with a hashtag or keyword that will work wonders for your business and customers. In this context, you may buy likes on Instagram to boost your follower count eventually.
Data-Driven Content
By learning important Instagram analytics for your business, you can identify the specific posts that are most effective and popular. You can learn about the posts that effectively boost customer engagement. You may use a host of metrics extending over diverse time ranges. It will help you in finding out the things that are working and try replicating them with posts that are quite similar.
Best Posting Time
You should have enough data to know precisely when your customers or targeted audience generally spend time on the platform for choosing an optimal time for posting o Instagram. The best part is that you can determine the best posting time easily. You may monitor your posts over a month or just a week to know when your post got the maximum engagement and most views from your audience.
Also Read: The Ultimate Guide To Instagram Tracker
You may use an effective Instagram analytics tool for knowing the perfect posting time. Once you understand the importance of perfect timing, you will automatically realize that wrong timing is the root cause of poor or lower audience engagement. You may be having brilliant content, but without in-depth knowledge about the ideal posting time, all your efforts could go to a complete waste.
Engagement Rate
When we talk about social media and Instagram, the term “engagement” is a metric for how users like, comment, or otherwise interact with the content that you post. Since viewers have to put in a degree of effort to “engage” with the content, this can be a reliable metric for content quality as well. Engagement rate is one of the most vital ranking factors for the algorithm, and it is essentially a ratio of the engagement gathered by the particular post to the total followers the account has. It is a fairly simple calculation and a metric that is easy to track over time.
If you notice your posts aren’t getting engagement in line with your expectations or competition, it might be time to alter your content strategy. You can also look for outliers, posts that get significantly higher or lower engagement, and learn from them to fine-tune your future content. On Instagram, video content and stories tend to get much higher engagement than standard picture posts. It is worth remembering that while engagement is a reliable indicator of activity, it has no indications for quality or sentiment. It means that it is hard to say when a post is doing well because of genuine happiness with the content or whether it is being spammed or receiving several angry comments.
Hashtag Metrics
Hashtags have been part of the Instagram ecosystem from the very beginning, and the algorithm takes them very seriously. They are added to posts, videos, and stories to indicate a unifying theme, and can then be used to categorize all posts that use the same hashtag. Tags are really important for discoverability on Instagram. Even today, adding trending hashtags to your caption allows your posts to be accessed by a much larger audience beyond your niche.
The popularity of different hashtags shows you the best type of content to post for more exposure and better engagement. Tracking popular hashtags can be a good source of content ideas while also giving you access to a broader range of potential followers and customers.
What this metric tells you: what is the participation according to the size of your audience.
If you take companies like Nike and Starbucks, for example, which get thousands of likes and comments on each post, it can be very overwhelming if your photos and videos only get a few hundred likes or more minor. But there is one thing you should keep in mind. Nike and Starbucks have millions of followers, so their posts have more reach. The follower engagement metric is perfect as it shows you how many comments and likes your posts receive per individual follower. This way, you don’t stop to compare your company’s numbers with those of the biggest brands. A smaller Page may generate more engagement per follower than a more extensive Page, even if they have less global attention.
When this metric increases, it shows that followers are engaging with the content and that the page is a priority for them as they like and comment on multiple posts. If this number is low or falling, users engage with your content from time to time but probably don’t visit your page regularly.
To increase this number, you can try to post more exciting content so that people are looking forward to coming to your page every day. For example, photographer Joel Strong takes pictures all over New York and replaces the heads of the people in the photo with the leaders of celebrities and famous people. Followers can’t wait to see what you post, so they keep coming back to your page.
What this metric tells you: is the reach of your posts.
Up to this point, the Instagram data metrics we’ve seen are focused on measuring the engagement you generate and the activity around your account. But let’s not overlook one of the universal metrics of social media: followers. Although it is more important to have engaged followers than a vast number, the numbers are substantial.
Ideally, the number of followers will grow over time as you build your brand. Whether through influencer recognition, word of mouth among friends, or even paid ads, the idea is to grow your audience to validate your social media presence and reach more people.
Instagram Followers Gained
When you evaluate this metric, do so over some time. A daily follow-up will not give you the information to make informed decisions. For example, if you’re only getting a few new followers each month, you’ll need to increase your marketing efforts. On the other hand, if you evaluate the number of new followers for a month and notice a significant increase on a specific day, you should investigate what you did that day to achieve that growth and be able to replicate it.
Some marketers look at the number of followers as a vanity metric, and that may be the case. However, the real benefit of measuring the number of followers is knowing your potential brand reach for the content you post. Pages with more followers have more space. If fewer people see your posts, you will have less engagement. Having more followers represents a better chance of getting users to see your content.
What this metric tells you: how much traffic your website receives from Instagram Data
One of the biggest complaints businesses have about social media marketing is that they can’t track return on investment (ROI). While we know it’s possible to track ROI from social media, Instagram has made it difficult for marketers as the app doesn’t allow links to be included in posts. So what can you do if you want to promote new or unique content on Instagram and be able to track the results easily? You can use UTM parameters, of course.
UTM parameters are tags that can add to a URL to give Google Analytics more information about the link. By adding UTM parameters to the links you share on Instagram, you can accurately track your campaigns and traffic from Instagram. Here you can find a complete guide on configuring the UTM parameters for social networks. Since the URL will be a bit longer, it’s good to use a URL shortener like Bitly when including links in descriptions. In this way, people can open the browser and type the URL.
Another more convenient option than adding a URL in the description is to use the bio. Instagram allows you to have a link in the profile. Some brands like to use this link to promote special offers or new content. Whenever you have something new to promote, it’s as simple as changing the link. If you choose this option, it’s still a good idea to use UTM parameters.
Conclusion
All businesses should rely on Instagram data analytics to steer their marketing efforts in the right direction. Brands that stay updated with the latest information about their potential customers and precise target audience will gain a competitive edge. Important Instagram Data or Analytics Marketers Need to Collect for Success
start measuring
The idea of dealing with social media metrics, data, and analytics might not seem the most exciting at first, but don’t get discouraged. As your Instagram account grows, you won’t be looking forward to reviewing the numbers and evaluating your progress. Plus, thanks to Sprout Social’s latest Instagram reporting trend, you won’t have to worry about getting confused with the information, which is a bonus.
The only way to improve and move forward is to know where you started and where you are today. Tracking these five Instagram metrics will make it easier to see what’s working for your business and make the right decisions to grow.
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What Instagram data metrics do you track? Leave us a comment and tell us about it.