Over the past few years, Instagram has shifted dramatically from a platform dedicated to sharing intricate details of your life to a space where you can create a community and find success. The app has always been popular, but as the creator community grows, so does Instagram’s popularity.
Instagram has proven to be a platform where creators and brands can develop a community, build brand awareness, and increase sales through engagement. All this is due to Instagram metrics that are essential to measuring success.
How Can I Use Instagram to My Advantage?
Instagram is the 3rd most used social media platform in the world with over 2 billion monthly active users. The platform’s user base is diverse, but the majority of Instagram users are Millennials and Gen Z.
Instagram offers high engagement, and with favorability to a younger demographic, this gives the upper hand for brands targeting younger audiences like Gen Z who currently have the most reactive consumer behavior. It’s the ideal platform to share single-image or carousel posts, reels, and stories.
Instagram Stories allow us to share in-the-moment content and to engage with your audience in real time with features like polls or questions. Stories are pushed to followers, so this format works best for an already existing audience that’s actively seeking to be included in what you offer as a creator on the platform.
Then there’s Reels. Similar to TikTok, Reels are short-form content that’s pushed to both followers and non-followers. Creators can take advantage of Reels to leverage trends and creative storytelling to reach new audiences. From a viral trending audio to a cinematic product teaser, Reels are made to share content.
Carousels can now include up to 20 images. Creators can use this to show multiple aspects of a topic with a single post rather than a single image. This format is great for posting short-text content, photos, gifs, or a mix of all 3 to tie together an engaging story.
Instagram is mainly centered around sharing visual content like videos and photos for storytelling and imagery. With Instagram metrics, creators can utilize this tool to understand how their platform is growing and what is or isn’t working. Sometimes we feel inclined to throw things at the wall and see what sticks, but when you understand which metrics are important to look at, it makes all the difference in the quality of your content.
How Can I Measure Success on Instagram?
Once you’ve created a business or creator account, you can understand your metrics fully by viewing your professional dashboard to analyze your insights. You have the key to understanding your followers and engagement through numbers.
Let’s break down the essential Instagram success metrics into account-level and post-level metrics.
Account-Level Metrics
Follower Growth Rate
Followers are an important part of your account — don’t just view them as numbers; view them as community members. They’re the ones who understand your content and can communicate with you better on how to improve it, which is necessary for brand growth.
When going through your follower data, you can track the increase and decrease of your follower growth over time, see where your followers are located, their age range, and what times they’re most active.
The most important insight to take from this metric is follower growth over time. Use this formula:
Follower Growth Rate = (New Followers / Starting Followers) x 100
When analyzing your follower growth rate, it’s important to review content to see what caused an increase or decrease in follower count. Followers that come and go are reflective of your content. Think to yourself, am I posting more or less? Am I posting at the times my audience is active? Am I posting less of a format my audience recognized me for? Did my recent video go viral, and that’s why I gained so many new followers?
All these are important questions to ask yourself as a creator when it comes to keeping track of your goals. Stick to what works best for you.
Account Engagement Rate
Many brands or creators struggle with engagement. Once the followers have been racked up, engaging the audience is crucial. It’s easy to lose an audience if they’re not engaged with your content. Engagement is key, and it’s critical to observe your own content to better understand it.
Engagement involves likes, comments, shares, and saves. Calculating the engagement rate helps you assess the effectiveness of your content strategy and how well it resonates with your followers.
Reach and Impressions
Although different from one another, reach and impressions are two entities that belong together to measure the impact of your content.
Reach refers to the number of unique users who have seen your content through the discover tab, feed, tagged posts, hashtag search, or location.
Impressions represent the total number of times your content has been shown to users. If one user replayed your content multiple times, their view count is included in the impression count. Impressions can help you understand which of your content performs best and keeps your audience engaged.
Creators and brands need to understand the impact that they’re having on other users with their posts. Monitoring reach and impressions helps to comprehend the visibility and impact of your posts.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR measures the percentage of users who clicked on a link or call-to-action (CTA) in your post. This mostly refers to Instagram Stories, sponsored posts, and campaigns.
Use this formula:
CTR = (# of clicks on a link / # of views on a post) x 100
When looking at a high CTR, it means your CTA was strong and your content was relevant to their search intent. However, a low CTR means your content has areas for improvement to be able to reach the right audience.
Post-Level Metrics
Watch Time
Watch time goes hand in hand with impressions and reach, but it dives deeper into how users viewed your content. Instagram provides insights on each piece of content you post where you can track average watch time and view rate.
Average watch time helps you compare the length of your Reel and how long your users chose to spend time watching that video. If a Reel you posted was 30 seconds, and your average watch time was 5 seconds, you can ask yourself questions like, “What lost my users’ attention after the 5 second mark?” This gives you an opportunity to review each content piece and see where you lost your audience. Visual hooks, verbal hooks, etc. are important aspects to retain engagement.
Watch time is a great metric to compare and contrast the success of individual pieces of content to see which styles and formats maintain or lose engagement.
View rates show the percentage of followers and non-followers who watched your video after the 3 second mark. If you can’t grab people’s attention within the first few seconds of a video, the majority of them will swipe away.
Likes
Likes are important when looking at how others view your content. Likes per reach is the percentage of viewers who like your post.
While having a high number of likes is favored, they should instead be viewed as an indicator of how well your content resonates with your audience. If you posted two different content formats about the same topic, the number of likes on each video can help you understand what type of content your audience favors more.
Shares
The number of shares you get is a great insight into how well your content performs. When your content is shared, it extends beyond your immediate followers to reach a wider audience. Each share introduces your content to new users who may not have discovered your account otherwise.
Sharing is crucial to increasing brand awareness and an online presence, which can lead to virality. Shares build community and trust. When users share your content, they’re almost endorsing your brand or message to their followers. This endorsement builds trust and credibility, as users are more likely to trust content recommended by someone they know or follow.
Comments
Social listening is key when building trust within your community, and comments are the easiest way to achieve that. The comments section is a two-way conversation where you and your audience can communicate with one another, whether you’re replying to a funny remark or answering a question someone has.
Looking through the comments on each piece of your content gives you a sense as to whether your audience is reacting positively or negatively. Every comment is valuable — each user brings a different perspective to the table.
Comments also shed light on opportunities to bring online conversations to real life. This deepens the relationship between you and your audience, showing that you’re actively listening to what they have to say as people who’ve been loyal followers.
Hashtag Performance
Hashtags are key for discoverability on Instagram. Hashtags are crucial in expanding your reach and attracting new followers. When using hashtags, the analysis of their performance allows you to identify which ones are driving the most engagement so that you can adjust your hashtag strategy accordingly. They also help narrow down your content for others to see. Your content can be easily searched when using hashtags that are the most relevant to your content pieces.
Instagram Stories Metrics
Instagram Stories are a great way to break the fourth wall and talk with your followers as well as get excited about your content. It’s an easy way to continue to be active with your followers with minimal effort through links, polls, questions, and music. The questions feature is often a popular way we see creators and brands get users to speak to them, including product recommendations, participation for a giveaway, or to get opinions on a new release.
You can track Stories metrics such as completion rate, forward/backward taps, and swipe-up rate. Are enough people watching your whole story? Are they rewatching and fully enamored? How often are they swiping up? Evaluating such metrics can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your Stories content.
Connectivity vs. Discoverability
In the most recent updates to Instagram’s algorithm, the CEO, Adam Mosseri has broken down the difference of importance in likes and sends when engaging with current followers or trying to reach new followers. He calls this connected reach and unconnected reach.
Connected Reach
Connected reach is when content is shown to people who already follow you. If you’re targeting your current audience, likes will be more important to track than sends. Likes will tell you how well your audience connects with the content you’re posting.
Unconnected Reach
Unconnected reach is when content is shown to non-followers. If you’re targeting non-followers, sends will be more important to track than likes. Sends will tell you how other people are discovering your content, meaning you’re in someone’s DMs or work channel. With sends, you’re able to gain new followers and grow your audience from people who already like your posts. You want to create content that people can share with their friends.
Key Takeaways & Tips
Instagram is a great platform for growth. With Instagram’s unique features, brands and creators can deeply analyze their content to effectively connect with audiences, build brand awareness, and drive sales through engagement.
For best results in maximizing growth and reach:
- Focus on watch time. Perfect your skill in keeping viewers engaged within the first few seconds of your content to receive the most interactions.
- Post original content. It’s all about the remix — provide fresh perspectives to either create something new or build on top of existing content that helps your brand put their best foot forward.
- Encourage shares. Try to create content that your followers would send to their friends to maximize your chance of getting discovered by other people to grow your community.
- Keep videos under 3 minutes. Content needs to not only be visually appealing but engaging and quick to the punch to maximize reach.
- Check your insights daily. Overlooking key metrics won’t boost your performance. Social media is a constantly evolving space — what works one day may not work the next. It’s best to actively respond to your metrics and see how it can transform the content you make.
If you need help refreshing your content strategy, our growth experts can help.
