How to Use Instagram Analytics to Increase Followers and Engagement

Whether you’re a major brand or casual Instagrammer, keeping a close eye on your Instagram analytics can help you find areas to improve your presence and boost engagement. 🙌

For businesses, bloggers, and influencers, this translates
into more leads, website traffic, and sales.

You can’t go wrong by tracking your data to figure out what
works and what doesn’t. Here’s how to do it with Instagram analytics, free
information you can find in the app, and other sources.

Instagram Followers Analytics to Track

Start by checking your Instagram followers
analytics to see if your target audience matches up with the actual
audience your posts are reaching.

If your audience doesn’t match, that’s okay too. By learning
about your current followers through Instagram analytics, you can work with
what you’ve got and create content they’ll enjoy. Look at figures like:

• Age groups: Instagram breaks ages up into
  typical marketing segments like 13-17, 18-24, and 35-44.
• Gender: Keep in mind Instagram also
  allows users to choose “prefer not to say.”
• Location: You’ll be able to see the top
  five cities. 🌍
• *Bonus* Time: The time of day your
  followers are most likely to hang out on Instagram.
• *Bonus* Days: The days of the week your
  audience typically opens their Instagram app.

Source

Profile Analytics

Now it’s time to see how your overall profile performs. You
can grab a lot of awesome information about your general Instagram presence from
these metrics before even looking at your individual post performance.

• Impressions: How many times your posts
  showed up in hashtag searches or users’ newsfeeds.
• Interactions: The total number of engagements
  across your posts including likes, clicks, and comments.
• Mentions: People talking about you or
  trying to get your attention. 🗣
• Profile visits: How many times someone
  clicked over to your profile from another location on Instagram.
• Clicks: This figure tracks the off-site
  clicks to your URL from your Insta profile.
• Reach: While impressions tell you the
  total amount of times someone saw your posts, reach tells you the number of
  individual accounts.
• Contact links: How many times people
  engaged with your email or call buttons.

Individual Post Analytics

Instagram analytics for individual posts helps you figure
out how your content performs on a micro-level.

Are you sharing the types of photos and captions that your
followers want to see? Are your hashtags working?

Luckily, detailed Instagram analytics are free through the native app so long as you have a business account.

• Discovery: Anyone who runs a business
  account could win a coveted spot on the Instagram discovery throne! If one of
  your posts makes it into the Discovery page, Instagram will let you know here. 🔎
• Impressions: How many times a set of eyes
  saw your posts from a newsfeed, hashtag search, or another platform.
• *Bonus* Reach+: How many individual
  people saw your post. Instagram will also let you know which percentage of
  people you reached weren’t already following you.
• Interactions: How many people engaged
  with your post and the actions they took such as comments, likes, saves,
  profile clicks, website clicks, email button clicks, etc.
• Followers: How many new follows you
  gained from the post.

Stories Analytics

Finally, Instagram also lets you check how your stories performed. Stories are valuable Insta real estate because they instantly throw you to the top of your followers’ homepage.

• Reach: How many individual accounts
  opened your story. 👀
• Impressions: The total number of times
  your story was viewed across all accounts.
• *Bonus* Replies: How many people sent a
  reply.
• *Bonus* Exits: The amount of times
  someone exited your story before it finished. ☹

Instagram Analytics to Track For…

Putting your analytics data together is only half of the
battle. Understanding how to interpret those metrics makes all the difference.

Upping Your Follower Count

Obviously, you could start by checking your profile-level analytics to see how you’re gaining followers over time.

However, you could also check Instagram followers analytics
on your individual posts to get a better idea of how your content performs.
Start by looking at how many new followers you gain from a specific post.

Now, look at your reach and the percentage of people who saw
the post but weren’t current followers. If several new accounts saw the post
but didn’t click follow, that could be worth looking into deeper. Maybe
they weren’t part of your ideal audience or the content wasn’t engaging enough
for them to hit “follow.”

Exposure and Brand Awareness

Awareness and exposure are two of the best reasons to use
Instagram as a blogger, brand, or professional. 👁

Of course, more followers translate into more awareness but that’s not the only metric you can keep an eye on.

Stories are a great place to start. A low exit rate is good
and a high reply rate is even better!

In terms of individual posts, impressions and reach are
important because it means people are seeing your posts. Just because someone
sees a post though, that doesn’t mean they’re remembering anything about it.

Instead, look at likes, comments, clicks to your profile,
and best of all: saves. You can’t track when someone bookmarks a page on your
website, but you can track when someone saves your Instagram post for
later – this info is gold for awareness!

Boosting Engagement and Off-App Traffic

Start by tracking the obvious metrics like email, website,
and call clicks if you’ve included these buttons on your page. 📞

Next, look at the two bonus metrics mentioned in the first
analytics section about your followers: active days and times. To increase your
engagement and boost off-app traffic to your website, you’ll want to post when
your followers are the most active on the platform.

Try an Instagram Analytics App

With Tailwind, you can also track your Instagram post analytics and much more. Tailwind’s algorithm scans your Instagram followers analytics and tells you the best time to post each day for optimal engagement.

The Tailwind algorithm also tracks hashtag analytics across
Instagram and lets you know which relevant hashtags to include in each post to
get your post in front of the right audience. Of course, you can also check the
engagement analytics across your profile and posts as well.

Try Tailwind Instagram analytics for free now – no credit card required!

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