Instagram Insights are Really Insights into Your Business
As Instagram continues to evolve as a business platform, we’ve kept a watchful eye on not only the new content features, but also its reporting and analytics capabilities. Many of us who have converted to a business account have first grappled with the potential trade off: Will more insights and business tools be a trade off for our current ability to connect with users/followers?
To be honest, our team has long suspected Instagram will slowly reduce the amount of organic engagement and exposure a business profile can enjoy without participating in some form of advertising. It’s exactly what happened to Facebook, so why wouldn’t they do the same for the most engaging social platform of 2019?
Here’s the good news: Up to now, we haven’t seen any major engagement restrictions for business accounts. (We’ve been frustrated by the “algorithm” changes like the rest of the world, but it’s nothing that was tied directly to business profiles). In fact, Instagram business accounts are enjoying more reporting and tracking insights than ever before.
Take Notice to These Instagram Insights
Profile Visits
Pretty straightforward on this one. It’s important that you check month over month your profile visits. Of course, special events or promotions can cause some serious fluctuation, but otherwise you’re looking out for a nice incline of more profile visits each month. It’s a numbers game at this point. The more eyes on your Instagram profile, the more conversions (be it calls, clicks, purchases) that you should see.
Email/Phone/Text/Get Direction AND Website Clicks
Like a goal conversion on your website, these actions indicate some pretty clear intentions and interest from your audience. Depending on your business, these numbers can vary drastically and should be reflective of your goals. Are you a restaurant/bar/cafe? Directions should be your #1 insight, as that’s a good sign they were a real, interested future customer. Do you sell e-commerce? You probably guessed it, but website clicks would be your most important action-related insight.
Reach Over Instagram
Instagram offers you both, but if you ask us, reach is more important and the stat you should key into. Instagram considers “Reach” to be the number of unique accounts/users that have seen your post in the given week. “Impressions” by comparison are the total number of times your posts have been seen that week. While together they are a great metric of your overall presence, we like Instagram Reach because it is more focused on the discovery of your page, and views by different people. And if you’re tracking growth, growth in reach would be most valuable.
Follower Location
This statistic is two-fold in our opinion. First, if you are a brick and mortar location, you want to be sure that you’re followers are relevant and can take the desired action of walking into your place of business. That’s not to say you don’t want to be followed by people from all over the country, but as you execute a growth strategy it’s most effective to have relevant local followers for a business with localized operations. The second piece of this statistic is relevant to businesses that benefit from filter markets. A boutique hotel would likely know their filter markets before executing on Instagram, and with this statistic they can better understand their actual social presence there.
Like all reporting statistics, the point is to analyze and then use the information to better your business, refine your marketing or identify opportunities. Using the boutique hotel example above, the business could take stock of their current position and filter markets and use targeted social and digital advertising to improve their presence.
There is a lot to learn about your business via Instagram. As part of our social media services, Coast Creative tracks all of these statistics (and plenty more) in order to gauge performance and create ROI-driven social media strategies. If you are interested in learning more, just give it a little CLICK CLICK right here!