How To Do Breakthrough Instagram Analytics For Powerful Content Insights
As discussed in our previous article, Instagram Data Part 1: How to Fuel Your Analytics Efforts, knowing your audience is key to establishing effective engagement on the platform. As new questions arise, it is important to have access to more data to dig deeper and find answers. So, what types of Instagram data can you access, and how?
A Rich Collection of Instagram Data
Plenty of tools will help you monitor basic Instagram metrics like followers, post counts, likes and comments, and hashtags. Hootsuite listed four of the most popular tools in their article. These tools are good for quick, superficial insights. If you want to have more flexibility and perform a more comprehensive analysis, you must have a combination of those tools or start collecting your own data. For this purpose, Instagram allows access to seven data points via its API.
- User allows you to retrieve basic information about users, see their media and newsfeed as well as the most recent media they liked
- Whether you are managing one or multiple accounts, user data provides an overview of any account. You could use it to your advantage by simply spying on your competitors.
- With relationship endpoints, you can access the follower lists (follower and following), lists of users who have requested to follow, get information about a relationship with another user, and modify the relationship with the target user
- Follower data helps you keep track of your audience growth, which remains a key indicator that your business is doing well on the Instagram platform.
- Media allows you to retrieve information related to the post (photo or video), including when and where the media was posted. You can also search for recent media in a given area
- With comments endpoints, you can get a list of comments received recently and create or remove comments (authentication is required).
- Likes allow you to view a list of users who have liked particular posts and set or remove a like (authentication is required)
- Based on information about your media, you can find the top-performing images on your platform. For example, you can calculate engagement by dividing the likes and comments by your follower or media count.
- Tags allow you to retrieve information about a tagged object, get a list of tagged posts, and search for tags by name
- You can find out whether people are talking about your brand with tags. Searching for industry-related tags will help you identify what people like to talk about and which hashtags will help you increase visibility.
- With locations endpoints, you can find media by location IDs, get a list of media objects from a given location, and search for a location by geographic coordinate
- You can work on your targeting options with locations by identifying where your brand is most popular.
This data provides an exceptional foundation for understanding your community and the performance of your content. However, to tap into the API requires some technical skill. If you do not have these skills, hiring someone to build connections to the Instagram API for you is a must.
Are You Harnessing Rich Instagram Data?
The Instagram API is very flexible, though accessing that data can present barriers for non-technical users. Even if technical resources were available, committing the time and money to build a custom software solution is often not appealing. At Openbridge, we have done the heavy lifting integrating with the Instagram API. We provide the data ready-made for analysis. Plug in your favorite analytics tools like Tableau, Qlik, Grow, or Mode, and you are ready to explore your Instagram data.
DWant to discuss how to leverage Instagram analytics 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 to 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.
