With additions like the shop now feature, it’s become clear that Instagram is gearing up to be a brand-friendly platform. If you haven’t included it in your social media strategy, now may be the time to consider it.
Of course, like any other platform, it’s only worthwhile if you receive a return on your investment. So, you need to determine how to report on your Instagram social media campaign results, and how to measure those results. keep reading to learn how to use the tools provided by Instagram and other companies to better understand the results of your campaigns.
Set Instagram Campaign Goals
If you don’t have specific goals for your social media campaign, any analysis you do as a result will be vague at best. Before you create a single post determine exactly what you are trying to accomplish.
Keep in mind that every objective you create may not be quantifiable with hard numbers. Still, having clear goals in the first place will put you in a better position to determine whether or not you made adequate progress.
Which Instagram Hashtags Perform Best for Your Brand?
Used successfully, the right hashtags can attract a wider audience. This can lead to your Instagram posts getting to the people most likely to engage with your brand or buy your products. Unfortunately, if you don’t have the means to measure the performance of your hashtags, you’re just engaging in a guessing game.
In addition to that, if you’re using multiple hashtags with each post, and you should be, how do you determine which of those hashtags are having the biggest impact? Fortunately, Instagram insights can provide you with some of the information you need regarding your hashtags.
If you go into the Instagram insights dashboard to view the insides for a single post, take a look at the discovery section. There The impressions that post receives are divided into different categories one of these is hashtags. This lets you know how many impressions were as a direct result of one of your hashtags.
Dalton Ives is a marketing analyst at Pick The Writer who says, “Over time, it will become clear which hashtags work best for you. You’ll also be able to determine whether or not you get the best responses using multiple hashtags, and which combinations of hashtags tend to perform better than others.” Measure your Instagram engagement against your competitors
The Instagram insights tool we’ll also give you insights into your post engagement divided into helpful categories. These include saves, comments, shares, and likes. To get this information simply open the post, then select view inside below the post.
A successful post will most likely have received different types of engagement. You’ll know that the post that has multiple shares, comments, saves, and likes most likely had a positive impact on the audience. Obviously, it would be the type of post you wanted to focus on in future campaigns.
Next, you might want to step back to determine your overall engagement rate. Engagement on a post is the percentage of your total followers they responded in some way to that post. So if you have 1000 followers and 50 engage with a post then your engagement rate is 5%. You can track several posts to come up with an overall engagement number.
Now that you know that it’s time to compare with the brands you’re competing against. You can start by first finding your competitors. Do this by conducting hashtag research and by seeing who has your followers attention. Then you can use one of many free or low-cost tools for Instagram competitor analysis.
Analyzing Your Instagram Stories
Instagram stories are currently one of the hottest features on the platform. However, just like anything else if you aren’t sitting in tracking any kind of metrics you won’t know if your efforts are worthwhile.
Once again, you can rely on Instagram insights for the day do you need to track the metrics on your stories. Just follow these steps.
- Go to your profile and top on the hamburger menu on the top right corner.
- Scroll down to stories and select ‘See All’.
- Keep in mind that your insights will stay up for just two weeks.
- View your metrics by tapping the top of your screen.
You’ll be able to see which of your stories received the most engagement. Here are some of the metrics you will find.
- Forward
- Next story
- Exited
Exit means they have gone back to their Instagram home screen altogether. Next story indicates that they have skipped your story to move to the next person or brand they follow. Both of these could indicate a loss of interest in your story. Forwarding simply means that they are skipping over that particular part of your story.
It’s really important to dig a little deeper here. it may not be as simple as the audience liking your stories or not. You may realize that they prefer shorter stories, or stories that have longer segments. Is it a good idea to take pen to paper and note various details about the stories that do well and the stories that don’t.
Which Instagram Posts Are Driving the Most Traffic?
If you can determine which posts on Instagram are your highest performers, you can use that information to inform the types of posts you share in the future. this way you’ll know exactly what your audience likes. you going to find your best performing posts on Instagram using insights once again.
Simply open the insights menu again and enter the dashboard, scroll down to posts under the content tab and tap see all. You will initially see all of your posts from the past year. They will be sorted by engagement. You can further drill down by modifying the time frame, selecting different methods, or choosing the type of media used to access your content.
If you aren’t getting the metrics you want out of any of your posts, it may be time to consider deploying a few tools to help. Consider using tools like Grammarly, Supreme Dissertations, Canva, WowGrade, and the Hemingway app for posts that are well-written and highly visual.
Check Your Follower Metrics
Of course, you can’t rely on your Instagram presence if you don’t have a significant audience. Ideally, you’ll begin to realize the types of posts your target audience wants and you’ll be able to provide that for them. Ultimately this should lead to your audience growing. Again, you have to measure that to truly know if this is the case.
It’s easy enough to track your growth metrics as it applies to your follower count. Just track the number from week to week. The problem is that the number alone is misleading. You need context. For example, if you double your follower count that might seem like good news at first. However, if you half your engagement metrics, at the same time that’s a problem. It could indicate that your followers art of low-quality or possibly bots.
Final Thoughts
Instagram audiences are growing, which is why it’s an important platform for any brand that wants to engage with a younger hip her audience. If you’re going to use Instagram as part of your social media marketing strategy you’ll need the tips above to measure your success.
