How You Can Use Instagram Insights to Get Ahead
When deciding which platform to monitor for useful information on potential donors, competition, and your general audience, X (formerly Twitter) used to be the default choice. Why? It’s easy to search, conversations are public, and you can easily and quickly analyze lots of data with tools using their API.
Those days are gone now that X (formerly Twitter) has drastically changed the price for access to its API. But Instagram is another popular platform that can give us valuable information, and it’s free.
Start with Instagram Insights
Insights is an in-house feature introduced to Instagram in 2016, offering detailed analytics and metrics for business accounts providing valuable information and data about your account's performance, audience demographics, content engagement, and more. Read TGL’s previous blog on Instagram Analytics, here.
General Overview: of your account's performance metrics, including follower count, reach, impressions, profile visits, website clicks, and email or phone call clicks.
Content Insights: View metrics such as reach, impressions, engagement (likes, comments, saves), and discovery (how users found your content - from hashtags, the explore page, etc.).
Audience Insights: Gain insights into your followers' demographics, including age range, gender distribution, and location. Understand the times and days when your followers are most active on Instagram, which can help optimize your posting schedule.
How to get the most out of Insights
In order for your organization to benefit from Insights, let's go over the basics. Insights are only available to Professional accounts which are geared towards either a business or a creator. Making the switch to a Professional account is quick and easy with these simple steps:
Open your profile and select Settings
Go to Account
Scroll down to ‘Switch Account Type’
Select either Creator or Business
Select a category to appear under
Review that your contact information best matches your brand's main contact points, including your business number, email, and location
Still having trouble? Check out this how-to straight from Instagram!
Use Insights to identify which types of posts or content resonate most with your followers and adjust your messaging accordingly. For example, if analytics reveal that posts related to a specific cause or impact generate more engagement, such as profile visits or shares, it would be wise to focus on creating content with a similar structure.
Say your brand is experimenting with various caption formats and you’ve posted 3 photos each testing various voices. Open your insights and look at your impressions, the posts with the highest engagement numbers (likes, shares, comments) is the ideal one. Impressions give a breakdown of how your post was found whether that be from accounts that follow you or non-followers. The goal here is to get your audience to consistently view and interact with your posts while over time garnering a bigger audience.
Track the most important numbers you can measure on Insights for your organization, in a spreadsheet or on a document you update every month – whatever way makes sense for you. You want to focus on the numbers that show you whether you’re achieving your goals on Instagram, so if you’re aiming for donations via this platform, track impressions and actual donations. If you’re aiming to build community, track engagement and specifically which types. Don’t try to track every number available; not all of that data matters if it’s not telling you whether you’re meeting your goals!
Make sure to take advantage of Instagram Search
While Instagram Insights may not offer specific mention tracking, keeping up to date with mentions of your account or of key topicsis as easy as a few clicks. A deep-dive of searching through accounts, comment sections, tagged posts might be time-consuming, but it’s really fun and interesting!
You can find whatever you’re looking for by searching for it. Try looking up your nonprofit or various iterations of your name, and explore through mentions in comments and hashtags to see what people have to say about you. Searching up keywords related to your brand can be helpful as well to get inspired on new ways to keep your audience engaged.
Examples of how to use Instagram Search:
Try looking up your nonprofit or various iterations of your name, and explore through mentions in comments and hashtags to see what people have to say about you
Search keywords related to your brand
Look for hashtags and even follow relevant hashtags and use the algorithm to your advantage
Instagram Search is a wonderful way to see how others view you online, do your own research, and discover new connections!
Another interesting method to try out is to look through your followers. Click on one, and check out who they follow/who follows them, and what type of content they post to get more familiar with them. Keep searching through followers and followings of your audiences' accounts and you may even end up back on your own account! Doing this will give you insight into what your followers deem as important to keep up with, or to see what your competitors are up to.