We all know that Instagram is one of the best social media platforms to promote your brand or business. It has hundreds of millions of active users. If you are able to successfully tap into this market then you will have decent growth. But to gain wider reach on Instagram you need a good strategy.
If you own a business then chances are you are already using a marketing strategy and want to know how effective it is. In this list, we go ver 5 metrics that you can use to analyze the performance of your strategy
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Analyzing Metrics of Instagram Ads
If you own a business and are looking to get popular on Instagram then it is wise to use a part of your marketing budget on Instagram ads. Though ads do not guarantee huge amounts of success if used right you can see quite a nice growth. But like any other tools be it free or paid, you have to understand the metrics of it to be able to use it optimally. This is true for Instagram ads as well. If you want to gain the most from an ad campaign then always keep an eye on the impressions, reach and frequency of your post.
Impression means the total number of times the ad has been seen by users. Reach means the number of unique users that have seen the app. If you divide the number of impressions with the reach you get the frequency. The frequency tells you how many times on average a single user has seen the ad.
The higher the frequency the lower is the chance of a user clicking on your ad. This is because the more times that a user sees an ad the less likely it is that they will feel the urge to click on it. So, keeping an eye on the frequency can help you understand how well your ad campaign is working. If the frequency is high you need to pause the ad and rethink your strategy. Maybe you need to change the picture or text of the ad.
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Hashtag Metrics
Even though social media platforms have a lot of moving parts and growing on these platforms is difficult when it comes to social media promotion you can boil it down to two main results that you want to achieve Viz. keeping your followers and gaining more followers or you can also buy Instagram followers. If you are looking for ways to achieve the latter then one of the primary ways to do it on Instagram is to use hashtags.
Hashtags are a great way for people to discover profiles that post content they are interested in. People who generally put certain hashtags in their posts or check out posts that have certain hashtags will find similar posts on their discover page. They may even actively check out certain hashtags.
So, if you do decent research and use optimal hashtags then you can gain wider reach and more exposure on Instagram. But to be able to tweak and optimize your hashtag usage you have to constantly check how they are performing. To do this you have to go to individual posts and use the view insights option. Here, you can see many metrics about your post. For this entry in the list, we are interested in the impressions from hashtags. This lets you know how many people have found your post because of the hashtags you have used certain hashtags.
Now, of course, if you use a bunch of hashtags it will be difficult to tell which ones work the best. So, you can use different combinations of the hashtags to understand which ones work more in your favour and get you more exposure. Then you can just use these for your posts.
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Learn to Use Various Tools
An effective way to analyze your growth and Instagram marketing is to be able to use various tools which can help you make sense of all the data. Gaining meaningful insights can help you find out how good your marketing strategy is and how you can tweak it to make it more efficient and effective. One of the best tools for this is Instagram insights. It is a must-have for any business or brand looking to promote on the platform.
It is a completely free tool. You just need to have a business account to be able to use it. Making a business account is easy and free. You can even change your profile to a business profile as well. Once you have a business profile you will be able to use insights to not only look at overall growth data like total post views, follower gain etc. but you will also be able to look at the performance of each post.
Other tools which can help you are Hootsuite Analytics, Iconosquare, keyhole etc. Hootsuite has a bunch of different metrics which go beyond what Instagram insights provide. Inconosquare is a free auditing tool that can analyze the past month’s data and tell you your excelling points and also give tips on how to improve. Keyhole is a good tool to have for tracking keywords and hashtags. You can even try some of the best instagram growth services to get your work done.
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Monitor Profile Visits
So, how can a profile grow and get popular on Instagram? Well, it needs to accumulate followers and to do that people need to not only engage with your post but also click on your username to visit your profile and then follow you. This extra step is one of the reasons why gaining followers on Instagram is tough. This is why you need to constantly check weekly profile visits to understand how many people are visiting your profile weekly.
Now, of course, these users may already be your followers but it still gives you an idea about how successful your posts and stories have been this week when it comes to making people visit your profile. Even if your followers are visiting your profile it means that they are quite interested in what you are putting out. This is why they are taking the time to check out your profile. Play with different post ideas, designs, captions, hashtags and text overlays to find out which combinations work the best in increasing the number of profile visits.
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Metrics on Generating Leads/Sales
If you own a business or brand and you are using Instagram to promote it then chances are you want to generate leads. You want people to look at your posts and then click on certain links that you provide in your posts, and stories. These links will take them to your online store or website. To be able to understand how good your Instagram marketing strategy is in generating leads and sales you have to monitor these clicks.
You also have to monitor how many people are calling or emailing you via links on Instagram. This can greatly help you in analyzing whether your marketing strategy is helping you in conversions.
This is in no way an exhaustive list. It is meant to give you an idea of what is important on Instagram and what your marketing strategy should be geared towards. We hope you found meaningful insights that you can use to improve your strategy. We wish you all the best.