How Tracking Your Analytics on Instagram Can Help Your Account Grow

Instagram has been an incredible growth tool for countless businesses, including mine, and if you look at the numbers, it’s clear why. Not only are there nearly 1 billion active monthly users to reach, but Instagram has a 2.2 percent interaction rate, the highest engagement rate of any social media account by far.

Even though you know business growth should be in the bag for you, you might not be seeing the results you’re hoping for. This is certainly what happened to me when I started. Your account doesn’t have as much engagement as you might have hoped, and you’re wondering where to look next. The answer is probably found in tracking your Instagram analytics online. Using a trusted tracking tool, you can get real-time, actionable information about where your Instagram account is now so that you can see where you’re going and where you want to be. Let’s look a little closer at how tracking this data can help your account grow.

Better Target Your Audience

The audience analysis tab is one of the best resources available to you when you track analytics. You already know a lot about your target audience, but this will provide even more valuable insights that you can use to grow your account rapidly.

Some of the top factors you can monitor in the audience section include locations, age range, gender, and general interests. You’ll also look at the hours they spend on Instagram and which days they’re most likely to engage. All of this information will help you create better content suited to your audience so they’ll want a deeper connection.

Instagram has the power to connect you with a very specific audience, but only if you know them as well as you know yourself. You’ll be able to plan posts that extend your reach to untold heights and acquire new customers like flies.

Improve Your Posts

When scrolling through your feed, you can see the comments and likes on each post. This provides general sense of what content your audience has engaged with and what they didn’t like, but there’s a better way to do this quickly with even more insights: The View Insights tab in your analytics dashboard, which is all about the performance of each post.

At first glance, you’ll see a short, summarized version of how your posts are performing. You can swipe up on each post to read more detailed information and view charts about forwards, comments, likes, and saves for each post.

Best of all, you’ll find discoverability metrics that will show you which accounts you’ve reached, new reach numbers, how you successfully reached them, and which posts were best. This information helps you find what you’re doing right so that you can replicate it.

For example, you might discover that a certain hashtag increased your visibility. It could also show you that videos performed better than your typical posts, or that your Stories ads have the biggest impact on followers.

Use All Your Resources

As you look over your account’s analytics, you’ll find categories that you might not have encountered before. It opens your eyes to the many features available to businesses. Instagram’s algorithm prioritizes businesses that use all their resources, and as you do, your analytics will prove rapid growth.

  • Stories: You definitely want to be using Instagram Stories since it has 500,000 daily users. Stories is prime advertising real estate and an excellent place to establish your brand’s personality, authenticity, and authority.
  • Live Video: Live video happens in the moment, giving followers a real-time overview of what’s going on in a business. It’s unedited and unfiltered, and viewers love it because it creates an air of authenticity.
  • Hashtags: Hashtags are one of the best ways to get your content front and center to a certain target market. Your analytics will show you whether or not your current hashtags are working and which hashtags you could be using for faster growth.
  • Polls, Boomerangs, and More: Create more interactions and engagement with things like polls, boomerangs, stickers, artificial reality, and more. These perform best in your Stories, and they can bring in excellent engagement that you can track on your analytics dashboard.
  • Shoppable Posts: To increase sales and revenue, use shoppable posts, which lets you sell products on Instagram without the consumers having to leave the page. You can track your revenue progress on your analytics dashboard.

Set Actionable Goals

Every Instagram account holder has at least one improvement they’d like to see on their account, and most have several. You can use the metrics you monitor on Instagram to achieve those goals.

Some of the most important metrics you should be tracking include:

  • Follower count
  • Impressions
  • Reach

As you monitor these numbers with real-time information, you’ll identify the most important areas on which to focus. From there, you can set actionable goals and track the results. Remember that when setting goals, it’s important to make them specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timed (S.M.A.R.T.). Looking at your current Instagram account data will provide you all the information you need to make an attainable goal, set a time frame, and successfully reach it.

Build a Community

One of the best things you can do for your brand is build a network of loyal followers. Instagram is an excellent place to do just that. You can connect with an interactive community and continuously monitor their engagement.

You should be constantly monitoring comments, story replies, likes, re-grams, hashtag uses, and other forms of engagement in order to see how your community reacts to your content. This community is filled with your customers, and you can keep close tabs on them through your dashboard.

Any business owner who’s serious about growing a business will check out an Instagram analytics tool right now. The data will provide long-lasting, invaluable insights that will streamline your strategy and guarantee results.

Melissa Thompson writes about a wide range of topics, revealing interesting things we didn’t know before. She is a freelance USA Today producer, and a Technorati contributor.