You’ve finally decided to make an Instagram account for your business to be more active across social media. You post content multiple times a week and even utilize their paid promotion features. Great! While you seem to have gotten the hang of using this app to showcase your brand, there’s still one question that remains. How is it helping your company? In this guide, we’ll explain how you can easily track the success of your Instagram page.
Followers gained. Everyone gets excited when more and more users begin to follow their social media pages, but what does having more followers mean for your impact? Keeping track of the changes in your followers helps to determine the total reach of posts. Rather than focusing on having a high following, focus on having a growing following. Tracking when your following rate begins to rise can give you a good idea of whether you are expanding your reach and gaining attention from new users. Try calculating your growth rate each month. To do this, take the number of followers you gained over the last month and divide it by the number of followers you had at the beginning of the month.
Engagement per follower. You know who’s being exposed to your posts on their timeline, now it’s time to monitor how individuals are engaging. This metric will help you to figure out what percent of your follower base is actually resonating and interacting with your content and brand. Look for changes in the average amount of likes and comments your posts receive, as well as other activity like profile visits and website clicks. Try calculating your engagement rate weekly or monthly depending on how often you post. Simply take the number of likes and comments you received during that week/month and divide it by the amount of followers you had during that same time frame.
Performance of individual posts. We tend to put a lot of focus on our post activity, and it’s for a good reason. If your audience is growing but your posts don’t seem to be making an impact, this might be a sign that changes and adjustments are necessary. You can review the number of impressions, likes, reposts, comments, etc. to understand how a specific post is performing. After you’ve reviewed the stats, compare the results of each post with one another to determine why some posts may be doing better than others. This can give you insights such as, the type of content users are drawn to, what time of day people are more likely to view your posts, how hashtags and mentions influence engagement, etc.
Performance of stories. Stories help to show off more of you brand’s personality and a behind the scenes look at what your business is up to. What can story views tell you about success? The way users interact with your story can reveal how interested they are in your company and content you have to offer. For business pages, Instagram allows you to look at interactions, replies, reach, impressions and navigation. Use the navigation feature to pinpoint how people are viewing your story. For example, taps forward indicate people are speeding through your story, while taps backward can reveal that the content caught their attention as they were speeding through. A backwards tap can also be a sign that people are rewatching your slide more than once. Exits and next story taps show when people are exiting out of your story, or leaving your story to view a different account. These metrics can reveal if content isn’t catching the attention of followers and how you can improve.
Now that you’ve learned a few easy ways to track the success of your Instagram, it’s time to open up the app and take a look at how your business is doing. Need some guidance starting an Instagram account? Let us help you out!
