Instagram is one of the most important and widely used social media tools in digital marketing. Whether you are an influencer trying to engage with a loyal audience, or a brand looking to maximize reach to new users, Instagram is often the perfect tool in order to meet digital marketing goals, and social media goals in particular.
What makes Instagram such a perfect tool is its ease of use, and likelihood to generate high engagement. Because viewers usually react better to visual elements over text or audio elements, Instagram is perfectly positioned to help you achieve great success in your digital marketing efforts.
It is also free to use, which is a huge plus to many businesses and influencers who use the platform to provide updates on their operations, announce promotions and even advertise to unreached viewers.
Now that you know why Instagram is so important in digital marketing, it is important to look at what metrics you should be monitoring to help you build that follower base and reach that targeted audience!
Instagram Algorithm
One more thing before we tell you which juicy metrics to prioritize, it is important to understand that Instagram uses a pretty notorious algorithm to boost and deliver organic posts.
A misconception about Instagram is that likes are everything. However, in Instagram’s current algorithm, likes are not as important as they once were, in fact, likes are mainly used by Instagram to get an idea of what content you like as a viewer so that they can tailor your experience, and provide you with similar content from other accounts that you may not already be following. So as someone posting on Instagram, likes are not the most important metric any more. This is actually backed up with the recent update Instagram has made that allows you to hide the number of likes you see on another user’s post. Currently the algorithm favors users whose posts generate high engagement and users who post frequently.
Good engagement is defined by a post that receives a lot of saves, comments and shares. But that is not all! The second half of generating good engagement on your posts is to engage with your viewers. Thank goodness this is often pretty easy as all you need to do is respond to any comment that is left on your post. This tip helps increase the number of comments you have on your post too!
Posting frequently on your account also helps your followers engage with your content more regularly, and maximizes the chances that a follower will see your content instead of it getting lost in the Instagram feed. It also maximizes the chance that your content will appear on the explore page which is great at reaching a larger untapped audience! So naturally, post count is a pretty big metric that you should be monitoring.
Instagram Overview
We have looked at which metrics are important according to Instagram’s algorithm, but there are still use case-specific metrics that should be important to you too:
Individuals
Even though likes are no longer favored by the algorithm, they are still incredibly important to identify what type of content your audience enjoys seeing from you. Let’s say you post cooking content and fitness content on your account. If you receive tonnes of likes for cooking content and very few for fitness content, it may be worth considering posting more content on cooking instead.
Reach and impressions are incredibly valuable in determining if your content is stretching further than your current followers. This is an important aspect to any user on Instagram as naturally you want to grow your audience, and the only way to do that is to reach users who are not already following you. So just to clear things up, reach is determined by the number of unique users that have seen your post, and impressions refers to the number of times your post was received. Therefore, the more reach and impressions you get the better!
Followers and new followers. Building on what was said in the last point, a priority for many accounts is to build their audience by increasing the number of followers they have. The idea behind growing your number of followers is that it effectively increases the number of people that you are able to promote products to or provide updates to, which can be incredibly profitable if you are using your Instagram as a key component in generating sales or providing a service, or making a name for yourself.
Demographics are also a key aspect of follower data, as it allows you to see which genders, languages, age groups and geographic locations interact with your account the most. This effectively allows you to tailor your content to resonate with these demographics or work on steering your content towards a different targeted demographic.
Businesses
Whether you are a brand that is promoting on Instagram or an individual building your business with social media, there are a few important business-related metrics that you should take note of on Instagram.
Not all of these metrics will be immediately available to your business account as you will need to choose which ones appear on your profile when setting up the account.
- Email Contacts – Found under the “contact” tab on your profile and will allow users to email you directly. Any email that is sent from this tab will result in 1 email in this metric.
- Phone Call Clicks – Found under the “contact” tab on your profile and will monitor the number of times the button to call you has been clicked.
- Text Message Clicks – Found under the “contact” tab on your profile and will monitor the number of times the button to message you has been clicked. This can be setup to receive messages as either a text message or Whatsapp message.
- Get Directions Clicks – Found under the “contact” tab on your profile and will monitor the number of times the button to display your physical address has been clicked.
- Website Clicks – Provides a clickable URL link under your profile bio, and will monitor the number of times the URL is clicked.
These metrics are important for providing viewers with a way of contacting you and/or finding out more about your business.
Bringing It All Together
While it may seem that you should either fall into the individual or the business category, the reality is that many accounts will need to monitor both of these sets of metrics, as well as the algorithm-favored metrics in order to maximize your digital marketing success on Instagram!
For individuals, it is also equally important to use a business account on Instagram as not only does it give you access to the business functions such as the various contact options, but also allows you to gain deeper insight into the performance of your metrics by unlocking the Instagram Insights function.
Don’t forget to take a look at our blog to find out more top social media insights and tips. Social media algorithms are constantly changing so stay tuned for the latest update from Oviond!
