Instagram Analytics: Powerful Data Insights Tips To Improve Follower Growth And Raise Engagement Rate
Start Tapping Into Instagram Analytics Tools To Better Understand Engagement & Post-performance
Instagram is used by over 300+ million active users who post 70 million photos a day — a picture really is worth a 1000 words (if not more).
According to L2 Think Tank Report, this engagement is 15 times that of Facebook. Clearly, visual media is an extremely appealing channel of communication.
In fact, photos increase engagement and receive. Photos increase engagement and get 94% more views than plain text content. Businesses that have used Instagram effectively have noticed positive impacts on their brand engagement.
Why Instagram analytics?
Instagram analytics allows you to dig into different data points like engagement rate, your top posts, and well as follower growth.
Your goal is to have Instagram simply measured and performance understood. If you understand optimal time to post to improve performance you can also save time. This is especially true if you are investing $$$ into Instagram users and advertising.
Lastly, don’t forget that analytics not only applies to your Instagram account but to any competitor's Instagram account too!
Get the most out of your posts with Instagram Analytics
Instagram has published an article on how to drive more engagement on its platform. Below are a few of the key takeaways:
- Know your audience, but target broadly
- Focus on bidding for website conversion rather than website clicks
- Instagram is mobile: make sure you use that to your advantage in your strategy
- Know your engagement lifecycle end-to-end so track the path to purchase
- Be inspiring, have content that drives action
- Understand how the context of your placements
If you don’t understand your audience success will be elusive. To truly understand how to connect and develop content strategies that really perform, tapping into your Instagram data is a must.
Dive into Instagram analytics
The best way to highlight how to leverage Instagram data is by example.
In this example, we have a company called GlobalCo. They are a retailer with five product brands; Fancy Shoes, DressCO, CO Accessories, Men’s COStyle, and the newly launched YoCO Pants. Each brand has a dedicated Instagram account.
GlobalCo identifies Instagram as a key social channel for them. The CEO wants to know just how well their investment in the visual media powerhouse is doing. This means that Sue, the social media director of GlobalCo, needs to be able to report the company’s Instagram performance. Sue knows that to answer the CEO’s questions she needs to inspect a few key performance metrics:
- monthly community growth (follows)
- content creation and publishing (media count)
- and community engagement (comments)
Community Growth
First, to check community growth Sue looks at the Follower Count that she created with Tableau.
From the chart, Sue is able to report that all brands are continuously gaining followers, except Men’s CoStyle. It seems like DressCo is the most popular brand and almost 4 times more successful than Men’s CoStyle. It’s probably a good idea for GlobalCo to have a closer look at media performance and engagement to see if it makes sense for CoAccessories and Fancy Shoes to borrow some DressCo strategies.
Content Creation and Community Engagement
Now it’s time for Sue to see how much media was published per brand and the comments they received over the last 30 days.
DressCo has the largest media and comment count, which makes sense. But then it gets more interesting. When we look at CoAccessories, with a relatively large amount of media posted, we don’t see much engagement.
On the other hand, Fancy Shoes brand posts half as frequently as DressCo but the audience is almost 3 times more engaged (2.16% versus 0.78%). Sue continues her analysis to find out what drives engagement and what the profile of the engaged audience is. She decides to see if there are loyal followers who frequently leave comments by using the Followers with Most Comments chart.
Below, the Comment Count chart shows that the most loyal users are the followers of DressCO and Fancy Shoes brands.
The chart also shows that CoAccessories actually has a fan that is very interested in the brand and leaves 10% of all comments. Hmm, who is this person? Should Sue reach out to this person asking for feedback?
As Sue delves deeper into the analysis she will certainly begin to ask and answer more questions:
- Why accessories are not getting much traction? If both CoAccessories sales and social engagement are low, how do we change this?
- Which media resonates with our audience the most? Why?
- Who are the most engaged users? How do we identify their needs?
- Are there specific hashtags we are using and posting times that drive a follower growth for DressCo but not for other brands? Which DressCo strategies can we apply to other brands’ accounts?
- What other metrics should we be tracking to understand those patterns?
Any agency or brand team is likely wearing Sue’s hat. Her story tells us that having access to the data enables our ability to ask questions. The ability to access and answer these questions will lead to a better understanding of your audience, consequently, a higher-performing content strategy.
Are You Harnessing Rich Instagram Analytics Data?
Do you want your data from Instagram data stored in a data lake or cloud warehouses like Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Google BigQuery, Azure Data Lake, and Amazon Athena?
When you pair Instagram insights data with a fully automated, zero administration Openbridge data pipeline service, all performance data is ready to be used in your favorite analytics tools like Grow, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, or Looker.
Get Started today!
DWant to discuss how to leverage Instagram data for your organization? Need a platform and team of experts to kickstart your data and analytic efforts? We can help! Getting traction adopting new technologies, especially if it means your team is working in different and unfamiliar ways, can be a roadblock for success. This is especially true in a self-service only world. If you want to discuss a proof-of-concept, pilot, project or any other effort, the Openbridge platform and team of data experts are ready to help.
Reach out to us at hello@openbridge.com. Prefer to talk to someone? Set up a call with our team of data experts.
Visit us at www.openbridge.com to learn how we are helping other companies with their data efforts.
