Instagram has approximately 1 billion active users, making it one of the largest social networks in the world. Effective use of Instagram can create an engaged audience and ultimately lead to more customers for your business.
To make the most of your Instagram account, it is important to figure out what your audience wants to see. The best way to understand your audience is by using Instagram’s built-in insights.
Switch To A Professional Account
Instagram insights can only be used if you have a professional account. You can change your personal account to a professional account from the ‘Settings’ section of your profile. It’s quick and easy, and anyone can have a business account.
For a step-by-step explanation of how to switch your account, just click here to read our previous article. In that post, we also looked at the differences between Creator accounts and Business accounts and which you should choose.
Instagram insights are available on both Creator and Business accounts and you can change your account type at any time so don’t worry too much about that now.
It is important to note that you can only see insights about posts which were published after you switched to a professional account so the sooner you make the switch, the better. Also, switching back to a personal account will mean your insights will be deleted so bear that in mind.
How To View Instagram Insights
Once you have your professional account, you can access Instagram Insights in two ways.
You can see the insights for an individual post by tapping on the post and then clicking the ‘View Insights’ button. This will show you how many likes and comments that post has, how many times it has been shared, and how many people have saved your post.
Below this, you will see Profile visits and Reach. Profile visits is pretty straightforward. It tells you how many people clicked to view your profile from this post. Reach tells you how many unique accounts have seen your post, either on their timeline, their Explore page, or from the hashtags.
If you drag the Post Insights section upwards, there is also an Interactions and Discovery section. These tell you things like how many people visited your profile and how many impressions your post got from different sources.
For more detailed insights about your account, head to your Profile Page. Tap the Insights button, which should be below the Edit Profile button. Here you have three tabs, Content, Activity, and Audience.
Content
Content will show you all of your Posts, Stories, and Promotions from the past seven days. At the top is an overview, telling you how many posts and stories you have published in the past week versus how many you posted in the previous week.
Posts are ordered by number of views from highest to lowest. Tapping on a post will open it up and you can tap ‘View Insights’ as we described earlier.
By each section, you will see a ‘See All’ button. If you tap on this you can view all of your posts, stories, or promotions.
For Posts, there are three filters. The first allows you to choose the type of post – Photos, Videos, Carousel posts, or Shopping posts. The second allows you to pick the time period you want to see posts from. The third option allows you to sort your posts by different interactions.
By default, your posts are sorted by reach, but these are several options available, including likes, follows, shares, and website clicks.
Stories can also be sorted by different interactions and filtered by time period. The Promotions section is divided into Active and Inactive.
Activity
Next, we have the Activity tab. The first section, titled Discovery, shows you how many people have seen your posts in the past seven days.
Reach is the number of unique accounts that have seen any of your posts. Instagram states that this is an estimated metric and may not be exact. Impressions tells you the total number of times that all of your posts have been seen.
Further down is the Interactions section. This shows you the number of actions taken on your account in the past week, including profile visits and website clicks.
Audience
Lastly, we have the Audience tab. This shows you how many people have followed and unfollowed you in the last week.
You can also see how many people followed and unfollowed you on a specific day in the week by tapping on the graph. Scrolling down, you can also see where your followers are located, by town/city or country, how old they are, and which gender they are.
Finally, at the bottom of the page, you can see when your followers are most active on Instagram. You can see which day of the week they are most active, or you can look at a specific day and see which times they are most active at. This can help you to decide when to post for maximum engagement.
Information on the Activity and Audience tabs is available for the past seven days only so it’s important to check regularly.
Why should you use Instagram Insights?
Regularly looking at your Instagram Insights can help you to understand your audience. Finding out which types of post get the most interactions can help you to create more content that will engage your followers. Discovering which posts get the most impressions can show you which hashtags are most effective. Monitoring your Instagram Insights can help you to build an engaged following, who could potentially become customers.
Do you check your Instagram Insights regularly? Let me know in the comments.
If you’d like help with growing and engaging your Instagram following, then get in touch. You can call us on 01923 93 92 91 or email us at chat@pretzelled.co.uk
