Great social media marketing, especially with Instagram, extends beyond creating and sharing content. Great marketers take a step further to ensure that their strategy is working. This is overly important as you can’t really manage what you can’t measure. This can be done partly through Instagram analytics tools.

Perhaps for any marketer, there are several questions ringing at the back of your mind. Among them is are any of my followers even seeing my posts? Am I missing on any comments in my post? How can I spend my marketing budget better? Well, if you sail in the same boat of questions, read on.

To your aid, thankfully, you don’t have to figure out these answers on your own. There are plenty of intriguing and powerful Instagram analytics tools that can keep your strategy sync. Finding the right tools come in handy in providing vital information about your social media strategy and content scheduling.

Instagram analytics tools can help in planning content and future campaigns, perhaps key features to reach your social media goals. For serious marketers, their goals should be specific, attainable, relevant and of course, timely. They should also be overly smart. This clearly depicts where efforts are paying off and where they aren’t.

That said, this module has everything to do with analytics. As mentioned, it is important to be tracking every single thing you do. In this module, you will go through all the tracking tools that we use to track your Instagram growth. Before diving into the various tools, let’s get to the importance of using Instagram analytics.

 

Benefits of Using Instagram Analytics

Some of the importance of making use of Instagram analytic tools include:

To learn more about your audience – using Instagram analytics provides a breakdown of your followers’ demographics according to age, location, gender and language. Depending of the tool you choose, you can track other aspects such as interests and online spending behavior of your followers. With such info at hand, you can craft an online presence that speaks volumes to your followers.

Measures success and improves your Instagram strategy – to begin, Instagram provides a direct and easy to parse engagement numbers through likes, mentions and comments. To boost this, Instagram lets you see these numbers over a period. By comparing the time periods using a chart representation, you can determine which is the best time to post, and what type of content gets more responses.

Evaluate the performance of your promoted Instagram posts – using analytic tools is a great way of learning if your promoted Instagram posts are getting adequate ROI. It lets you compare the organic and promoted impressions. This gives you a sense of how far your Instagram ads are widening your reach.

Helps in setting goals and objectives – analytic tools reveal the weak areas in your account. They drill down the problem areas thus makes it easy to identify goals and objectives.

Balance resources – as you may have experienced, there are several costs of social media. They include labor, training and development. Besides, technology, consultants and agencies. With Instagram analytic tools, you can clearly cut the wasted resources and diverting them to where there is much needed attention.

Plan campaigns – learning information such as which hashtags to use, who are the top influencers and much more is crucial. For marketers, your next social media campaign should be based on tis knowledge. This makes the campaign a success and not an accident.

Gaining a competitive edge – with analytic tools, you get to know what others in your field are doing.

 

Measuring Success

There are various metrics that can be tracked using Instagram analytics. So to say, metrics can be broken down into two types. They include:

 

Account metrics

They provide a record of your Instagram activity over time. Some of the components of this metrics include:

• Top post – this simply defines an Instagram post that has earned the most impressions in a specific month.
• Top mention – this metric identifies the post with most impressions in which another Instagram user mentioned your name. This helps in finding top influencers worth reaching out to.
• Top follower – you can get to identify your follower with the most number of followers in their account. They might have not shared your content but have a large potential audience.
• New followers – this analytic result shows how your campaigns and posting strategies impacts your follower count.

 

Individual Post Metric

These metrics keeps tab on each post. This points you towards your campaign goal.

• Engagement – this is the number of times Instagram users interact with the specific Instagram post. It is a valuable tool to gauge what is working and what’s not.
• Engagement rate – this ranks the number of engagements such as likes, mentions, replies and much more. It gives an idea of the percentage of audience engaging with your content.
• Instagram reach percentage – this is arithmetically the total number of impressions divided by total number of followers. Is a small percentage of your followers saw the post, you might consider reposting the content in a new, fresh way.

 

Top Instagram Analytics Tools

Iconosquare

This tool is a great starting point for your Instagram account management and analytics. Simply put, this tool analyzes your Instagram account and shows your audience engagement, growth over time, top followers and other essential metrics. It can also serve as a management tool that helps users schedule and draft posts from their PC.

Iconosquare kicks off by aiding users understand how posting frequency relates to or affects new followers or lost ones daily. It also provides a buffer-like tool that helps in managing how you post across various accounts at the same time.

This makes it a perfect tool for freelancers and agencies who want to save time when managing various clients. This tool also shows some comments and interactions on individual posts, thus helps you to keep the conversation going.

The best part of Iconosquare is the ever ready gallery library that lets users pull beautiful and high resolution images for uploading within seconds. It also features an editorial calendar that enables users to schedule posts ahead of time. This makes it easier to plan out content in advance.

The other vital functionality of this tool is the ability to search for influencers. This might help you in getting some insights for new campaigns and posts. You can even compare influencers based on their own followers and engagement metrics. This helps you to understand what you are dealing with before deciding to reach out to them.

If you thought that’s enough, the analytics part of this tool is interesting. The tool has nearly all the basics, letting you analyze your follower growth over time, losses every day, gains and even a worldview of where your followers are located. Quite amazing. Isn’t it?

The other analytic aspect of this is that it allows you to see how individual hashtags are performing. You can also view the best times to post and benchmark your engagement rates against your competitors. Iconosquare offers a 14-day free trial for Instagram users that require subscription afterwards.

 

Social Blade

Social blade tool is the easy way to track your growth. It provides lots of insights and analytics. You can search anything from Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter accounts and find various patterns in behavior. If you do not use social blade you don’t know the effectiveness of your shout out.

Social blade can also be used to monitor the number of followers your influencer is gaining or losing daily across a certain period. If you find that an influencer is losing followers in an abnormal rate, there is a possibility that they might have bought their followers and the “lost” followers have closed down.

You can also put social blade to use in checking out who is using the “follow unfollow” methods. The results could indicate that the account follows repeatedly 100 or so accounts and unfollows them later, the account could probably be using this tactic.

The final way of using this Instagram analytics tool is that it checks whether an account has genuine following by looking at the number of likes on the accounts image.

How Social Blade Works

• Download the app on your phone
• Search the account on the Instagram
• You can see the summary of followers

 

Social Rank

Social rank is one of the analytic tools that can help to grow your account. It allows you to discover your followers. This platform is available on Instagram and Twitter. It does more of an audience insight tool than an activity and engagement analysis tool. For instance, most tools are more focused on the hard data or your post’s individual performance metrics.

On the other hand, social rank does the same, but is more concerned with identifying your follower patterns. This helps in tailoring your content updates to suit your audience. The tool provides great details of many aspects including the common terms used by your followers, posts and bios. You can even see the commonly used emojis in your target market.

Social rank can also be used for local marketing. to do this, you can search for target Instagram users by location. This helps you to reach potential customers for local live events and other engagements. The follower filter helps you in narrowing down the audience into small segments or sections based on certain criteria such as the number of followers, specific companies, gender and a combination of these criteria.

The latest feature of social rank is the Realtime feature that allows users to monitor who is saying what. It also allows you to respond to them publicly or privately within seconds. These features makes social ranking incredibly powerful.

It is recommended to use this tool for PR campaigns and for larger influencer campaigns. It works best when there is need to identify deep audience insight to build some buzz around your businesses’ latest launch.

 

Simply Measured

Just as the name suggests, this tool helps you to evaluate how far and wide your market is on Instagram. Monitoring both new and total follower growth is perhaps a good place to start when formulating a marketing strategy.

Simply measured helps in providing a complete snapshot of how your video uploads are performing. This is from the basic views and even conversations gained. It also helps in benchmarking your performance against competitors.

The best with this is that you can see the potential influencers who already follow you. Through this, instead of spending much on massive influencer campaigns, you will be able to work on some fraction of the market not adequately reached.

All these metrics are displayed in a simple to read dashboard. This gives you an idea on which of your posts are providing the best bang. It also points you in the direction of new comments and similar community discussions that you might want to participate.

This tool features a social conversion funnel that helps you to view the engagement-based activities that increase your bottom line. You will be able to instantly see the number of likes and comments rolling on a daily basis.

It even breaks down the results on a daily basis to help you identify the best time and day of the week you post. These seemingly little changes maximizes the amount of interaction your individual post gets. The tool overlays the number of photos you are posting with the number of engagements in each photo. Through this, you can tell if engagement is legit.

 

Sprout Social

Not such different from Iconosquare, Sprout social combines the analytics with content creation as well as management tools. it features a full editorial calendar that helps in scheduling new content across various social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook.

This analytic tool is the best choice for large organizations that have rigid guidelines. This is because it has centralized media library to manage with built-in easy editing tools. Besides, sprout’s tool features a social CRM that funnels conversations into a central “smart” inbox. With this access, you can boost conversations over time. From this, you can view the entire contact history with individuals and tag messages or assign tasks internally.

 

Final Verdict

Social media is conclusively simple at the end of the day. To begin, you should learn what your audience wants and are looking for. Secondly, you need to give what they want consistently. This looks quite tougher as it sounds. However, this can be easy if you use the right tools.

Instagram has the possibility of reaching new audiences, widen your brand visibility and deepen the relationships with your social media users. Unfortunately, it could be quite impossible to track the essentials of gauging your goal completions.

Thankfully, there are Instagram analytics tools that go beyond the metrics. You will be able to identify your potential customers, figure out what they are interested in and learn the best way to serve them with new stuff.

Whereas it is essential to create beautiful content resonating with your audience, the other half of succeeding in social media marketing is developing a good marketing strategy. These tools and platforms can help bring your plan in full circle that ascertains your time and budget are efficiently spent.