Those who have an Instagram business account have an advantage in understanding the influence of their posts and how to utilize your Instagram account in the best way. However, understanding all of the information Instagram gives you can be a bit of a challenge and takes a definite learning curve. In this article, we are gonna focus on understanding the activity on your posts and the information regarding your posts.
The first section, “content”, shows the most information about your individual posts and stories. Here, you can find everything from how many people saw your posts to the number of people who emailed you after seeing a post. I find that I use the category “Feed Posts” the most, as it gives all of your information on each post. By going under “See All”, and adjusting the filters at the top, you can designate how far back you want to see insights for, what information you want to find, and the type of media you are looking at.
The filters under content can get a bit overwhelming with the number of options there are. Let’s break them up into some categories:
Who’s Contacting You (the last 30 days):
- Calls
- Emails
- Get Directions
- Texts
Instagram Activity (the last 6 months):
- Comments
- Likes
- Engagement
- Follows
- Saved
Reach (in the last one/two year(s)):
- Impressions
- Profile
- Visits
- Reach
- Shares
- Website Clicks
The information on who’s contacting you can be useful in understanding what your followers are drawn to. What made someone interested in contacting you? Was it a particular notable client who allowed extra intention to be drawn to your account? Understanding what pushed someone to take initiative in interacting with your business is an important piece of information to have. However, this is arguably the least helpful section of your insights (especially for a photographer or model), as the numbers will tend to be low, especially if you don’t have all of that information published.
Your Instagram activity is an important part of your insights, as it shows you all the information about people’s engagement with your account. This section is the most straightforward, as it shows your followers’ activity with the content on your account. Although you can find this information pretty easily on your individual posts, the value of going into your Insights and looking at this is that you have the ability to compare the activity on your posts (also the reason I recommended looking at the last 6 months). What was your most liked post or most saved? What did particularly well, and what didn’t? There tends to be a lot of repetition through these sections (i.e. a post with a lot of likes will also have a lot of follows and saves), so why was this post particularly successful? Lastly, your engagement is the combination of likes, comments, follows and saves, so if you want to save time, you can just look at this. However, I’d recommend going into your different categories to look at everything you have available.
The last category of your insights on content is “Reach”. Before we go into the different types of information you can find, let’s define the term “reach” itself. The reach your account has is essentially how many people see your account. Although in Instagram insights it is more specific to the number of different people who see your account, you can broadly define it as simply how many people your account reaches.
The filters falling under “Reach” give various forms of information about this. By understanding the number of people who visited your profile, the amount of times your content was shared, and the number of people who look at your website, it’s a way to gather information on what interests your viewers. This, for the most part, is pretty easy to understand, though the difference between “impressions” and “reach” can become confusing. “Impressions” is literally the number of times your post was seen, whether the same person saw it 2 or 20 times. “Reach”, however, is the number of different people who see your account, and the number of times one person looks at it will still always count as one. These two are arguably the most important filters, as they provide information on how widespread your account is, which will then impact your engagement and contacts.
Instagram has become one of the most important tools for businesses, no matter the size. As content creators, understanding the best ways to utilize social media to your advantage is crucial in running your business. We are lucky enough that Instagram provides all the tools you could possibly need, so now the next step is learning how to use them in the best way possible.
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