We are delighted to announce that Instagram have recently introduced analytics – or Insights, as the app calls them – and they look amazing! The new profiles offer businesses a wealth of super useful info that will help users reach the right audience at the right time.
In this post we’ll give you a quick tour of the tools as well as the inside scoop on how to use the new profile to your advantage. Much like Facebook insights, the new profiles will allow users to track important characteristics of follower activity including post engagements, site clicks, top posts, most popular hashtags… the list goes on.
If you haven’t already, the first thing you need to do is activate your business profile. To do this, tap the wheel in the top right of your Instagram profile and select ‘Switch to Business Profile’ (this option only appears if you have a Facebook account). You will then be asked to log in to Facebook and select which Facebook page you want to connect. You must be an admin of the page you’re wanting to connect, and can only connect one Instagram Business profile and Facebook page together.
Once you’ve activated your business profile, a chart icon appears next door to the wheel – here you’ll find your analytics. You’ll also notice a ‘Contact’ button appears on your profile besides the ‘Edit Profile’ button (or ‘Following’ button on other profiles), which allows you to call or email directly from the app. When clicking through to Insights you are immediately shown your weekly impressions, reach and most usefully, how many website clicks you’ve had. This means you can now track and compare conversion rates across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
So... what are the new features?
Top Posts
Instagram displays your top posts, organised by number of impressions per post, and you can choose to filter these from 7 days to two years. Do note that Instagram Insights do not pull historical data; it only starts tracking once an Instagram Business profile is set up.
You can click individually on posts to see the total number of times the post has been seen, the number of people who have seen the post and the number of likes/comments. The app also defines all its statistics for you (so you know what you’re looking at!) Example definitions below – you can see at any time by clicking ‘What do these mean?’ below your statistics.
Followers
Instagram will tell you your total amount of followers, including how many new followers you’ve gained each week. Aside from this, Instagram is handing out gold for businesses: follower demographic analytics. Now you’re able to see where your followers are located, their age range, and the gender – even the ratio of men to women!
Location: You can now see your top follower locations by country and by city. Not only is this incredibly useful data for marketers to understand their audiences, but it also gives you a better sense of when you should be posting time zone-wise to reach the majority of your followers. On this note, you can also see the days of the week when your followers are most active and the average times your followers are on Instagram, so you can schedule posts in the specific hours in which followers are most active – hooray!
Gender and Age: Next, you’re able to break down the gender and age of your followers and You can use the age and gender statistics to see the age range of men and women both separately and combined, and view a breakdown of your male to female follower ratio in a circle graph.
Promoting posts
Much like Facebook, you can now turn everyday image posts into ads at the touch of your thumb! You will see below every post you have a ‘Promote’ option – from here you are guided through the steps. Since the app is linked to Facebook, you also have the option to invite or find Facebook friends to follow.
We hope that all this rich data will help you create effective content for Instagram and market your business more effectively. HdK are delighted to see it in action and are excited to incorporate the insights into our clients’ digital marketing plans.
Any questions for us? Don’t hesitate to contact. We’d be happy to walk through the Insta-analytics with you.
That’s all for now!