With over 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram is one of the most popular social media sites, globally. This makes it an excellent platform for growing your business — if you’re tracking the right metrics.
[Read More: How Do I Start a Business Instagram Account?]
Reach
When you track your reach, you can see how many new people see your posts on Instagram. Unlike impressions, which shows you the total number of views a post received, your reach is the unique number of views on each post.
Tracking your reach will show you if your business is reaching new accounts and expanding your audience on Instagram. If your reach on a post is lower than expected, the following factors could contribute:
— Whether or not you used hashtags.
— Type(s) of hashtags you used.
— Time of day you posted.
— CTA (call-to-action) you used.
— Type of content you posted.
To track your reach, you’ll log into the app, go to your profile, and click on a recent post. Underneath the photo, you’ll click on the view insights tab. From there, you can swipe up and see your total reach and impression on that post.
Total engagement
Most people know that a large following doesn't matter if your engagement rate is low. You can measure engagement by the number of people who are liking, commenting, bookmarking and sharing your posts.
If your total engagement is low, this could mean a few different things. You could be sharing content that isn’t resonating with your audience, or you could be posting at the wrong time of day.
Monitoring engagement can be tricky since everyone uses a slightly different system to track this. If you use an Instagram scheduler like Later, every post's engagement rate is automatically tracked for you.
Your total number of followers is mostly a vanity metric and won’t give you much insight into your marketing plan's performance. But follower growth can be a valuable metric to track.
Instagram stories
If you aren’t taking advantage of Instagram stories, then you need to start. Your feed will draw in new followers, but creating stories is how you build a relationship with your audience.
And every story has its own metrics that you can track. By following the stats of your Instagram stories, you can see which posts resonated with your audience.
Here is what you want to monitor:
— Accounts reached.
— Interactions.
— Follows.
— Story exits.
— Watch through rate.
— Completion per story.
Hashtag performance
One of the trickiest parts about using Instagram is finding ways to get around the algorithm and get eyes on your content. Using the right hashtags will help you do this.
Hashtags help new people find your content and ensure that you’re reaching the right audience. You can use up to 30 hashtags on each post, but you need to make sure you’re choosing wisely.
That’s why it can help to track the performance of your hashtags and see which ones do well over time. This is the best way to keep your momentum going on Instagram.
If you use a social media scheduler like Sprout Social, you’ll get a breakdown of each hashtag’s performance. You can see how often each hashtag is used and what the total engagement is.
[Read More: How to Use Hashtags on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter]
Website traffic
One of the downsides to using Instagram is that you can’t include clickable links within your posts. There is a swipe up feature in stories, but it’s only available to accounts with more than 10,000 followers.
You can include a link in your bio, so it’s helpful to know how many people who find you on Instagram will click on your website's link. To track this information, you’ll log into Google Analytics and click acquisition, then the social tab.
That way, you can see which social media channels drive the most traffic to your website. And specifically, you’ll see how much Instagram is helping you grow your business.
Follower growth
Your total number of followers is mostly a vanity metric and won’t give you much insight into your marketing plan's performance. But follower growth can be a valuable metric to track.
That’s because follower growth will show you whether your business is expanding its reach. You’ll calculate your growth rate by dividing the total number of new followers in a month by your base followers.
For instance, if you started with 1,000 followers and then added 100 new followers that month, you’d have a follower growth rate of 10%.
[Read More: How to Market Your Business on Instagram]
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