Leverage Instagram data to drive more followers and engagement

There are one billion active monthly users on Instagram around the globe. From high-school students to business tycoons, all use Instagram actively for personal or branded promotion.

On average people spend 53 minutes of a day on Instagram. During that time, more than 200 million people visit at least one business profile daily. This means your brand needs an IG business account to expand its reach and influence more people.

However, it’s a must to know that merely setting an Instagram business account will not help you outsell the competition.

You need to evaluate your Instagram marketing efforts and plan your campaigns strategically to get success. For that, you need to learn about your target audience and identify the hottest market trends — and that’s when you need to leverage Instagram data.

What’s Instagram Data Analytics?

If you are a brand seeking ways to refine and recharge your marketing efforts on Instagram, you need to gather Instagram data.

Valuable Instagram data like which post has received the most interaction, which content & hashtag is doing the best, and what’s the optimum time for posting can help you perform better at different funnel stages. Such insights enable marketers to know which strategies are most effective and what they need to stop or modify. One can even use Instagram analytics to compare your strategies with competitors.

Crucial Instagram Metrics to Track

As aforesaid, using Instagram data is a smarter way to uncover new branding horizons and attract more sales.

From finding micro-influencers to shaping your hashtag strategy, tracking these Instagram metrics can help you go a long way –

Insights of potential customers

To achieve your marketing goals, the first step is to learn and understand your customers.

Whether your goal is to boost sales, increase reach, or build customer relationships, knowing about your customers is essential. It allows you to make your product and services better and stand out from the competition.

Insights obtained from Instagram data allow marketers to categorize their customers based on age, gender, demographics, and location. You can set a direction towards the goal of your marketing campaign by having these Instagram data.

Instagram analytics serve you with deeper insights that help you understand your customers — what they are up to and how they feel about a brand. You can leverage such Instagram data to come up with laser-targeted content, hashtags, and keywords for your brand.

Engagement rate

The engagement rate shows how often users like or comment on your post.

When a user engages with your post, it means they made an effort to express their feeling and sentiment about your post. It makes the engagement metrics one of the most important metrics to track. A high engagement rate means the better success of your Instagram posts.

The engagement rate for Instagram measures the total engagement received over a specific period by an Instagram account.

Compare your posts and see which one is doing good. It provides you with better clarity for further posting.

Follower growth rate

It is another growth rate metric that is essential to understand your Instagram analytics.

The follower growth rate is somewhat different from the total follower count. It is a calculation to know how many followers have grown in a specific period. This Instagram metric gives you a better idea if your account’s following is experiencing an elevation or depression. It is pretty easy to calculate followers’ growth rate using the formula shown above.

Best timing to post

You can know the time range when your target audience uses Instagram. It gives you the optimum time to post; 11 am to 2 pm is the most optimum time to post on Instagram.

The good news is, with Instagram data analytics, it is easy to identify your optimum posting time.

Look for the posts over a week or month and find out when your posts receive maximum views and engagement from your followers. This way, you can avoid posting on poor posting time with lower audience engagement. Even your best content cannot provide expected results if posted at an odd time, and your efforts will be wasted.

Hashtag performance

Hashtags are important, especially for Instagram. It helps people find your post by specific intent.

People search with hashtags to find the posts relevant to their interests. When you add popular hashtags to your posts, it reaches a larger relevant audience. Popular hashtags help to decide the best type of content to post for better exposure and engagement. Using trending hashtags is vital for reaching new customers.

Story engagement

Instagram stories work great to send short snippets of your post to your followers. It allows you to share photos, videos, and external links.

Important metrics for stories:

• Reach: How many accounts viewed your story.
• Exits: From which story slide the user exits your story post.

Reach shows how many people are interested in your content. Exits show in which content type users are not interested.

Benefits of using Instagram data

Beat your competitors in business

Instagram data helps you with strategizing and performing best to beat the competition. It will allow you to do careful benchmarking and decide on KPIs that matter the most.

For example, when you have the right time to post, you can reach a larger audience every time you post. It will give you more customers than the competitors who do not know the optimum time to post.

Understand the target audience

The more detailed Instagram data you get, the better you can understand your audience.

As we have discussed earlier, Instagram allows you to look at data categorized based on gender, age, language, and location, it helps understand the audience better. With this IG data, you can know their online purchasing behavior and interest, letting you personalize and tailor content for your targeted segment.

Save your time and resources

When you don’t have enough data to plan a marketing campaign, it consumes most of your time — because you need to troubleshoot and hit and try, with no guarantee of success.

Fortunately, using Instagram data analytics, you can plan a campaign precisely and effectively with a higher success rate.

The data shows which content your audience admires and which content you need to revamp. So rather than wasting your time, energy, and resources on guesswork, use analytics and give your best in the first go.

A low-cost way to know the market opinion

Instagram has a billion users, making it an optimum platform to float ad copies and video content. It is a great way to know how your audience reacts to specific content.

As testing and tracking user response is easier at Instagram, even the non-Insta-typical brands regularly post on Instagram to test the impact of content. They use this Instagram data to refine their campaigns. They examine how different content like paid ads, organic posts, and influencer content is performing at different stages of the campaign. It is a low-cost way to know the market opinion. The brands then use the best-performing content and strategy for their landing pages and paid ads.

Technology brand ASUS France gained insights into the performance of influencer marketing approach and lowered the cost of purchase intent of branded content ads by 426X. It helped them define their future campaigns.

Source: business.instagram.com

Ensuring successful strategies & branded campaigns

For planning a successful strategy and campaign, it is crucial to have an understanding of patterns, trends, growth factors, and things to avoid in a campaign.

Instagram analytics allows you to compare growth during different periods. It helps you determine what makes you reach the peaks in your campaign. Then you can make necessary amendments in strategy to improve overall performance.

Ultimately, this ensures you do not take a gamble while planning and executing your campaigns — you strategize and make changes based on the real metrics.

Spot changing consumer demands and trends

Instagram data allows you to get insights into emerging trends and consumer demands. The brands can use such information to improve and develop their products and services.

To put it simply, the more you plug in the Instagram data, the better results you get!

Mentionlytics for your Instagram data analytics

Instagram data analytics is effective to strategize and develop successful marketing campaigns. However, it requires knowledge and experience to use the analytics tools profitably.

Having a social media monitoring solution like Mentionlytics makes gathering and analyzing Instagram data easier. The tool can help you find new ideas for content creation, analyze competitors, spot a crisis, and a lot more to skyrocket your Instagram account performance.

If you are interested in strategizing your Instagram marketing campaigns, try our tool for free!

Originally posted on Mentionlytics:
https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/instagram-data-drive-followers-engagement