3 Instagram Insights To Consider When Planning Content

Social Media isn’t all about creativity, although obviously it plays a big part in your success especially on Instagram. Any good social media strategy will put just as much emphasis on the insights and analytics of your profiles, as the content itself. You don’t even need an expensive corporate tool to gain valuable information on your instagram activity, the in platform Instagram insights tool is a great starting point. Here at Wriggle Marketing we’ve put together 3 quick ways to use the Instagram insights function when planning your content. 

Why should you use Instagram Insights for content planning?

A common mistake that many small businesses make is sharing content with no plan or thought process behind it. Posting for the sake of it, or posting with no pre planning will often be time consuming and generate little result for your effort.

If you’ve been posting on Instagram for a while and aren’t getting the results you were hoping for, or want to get better at content planning then this post is for you.

Instagram Insights gives you a head start in creating a plan, providing the exact information to get the most out of your content. If you simply don’t have the time or money to spend deep diving into the analytics of every profile, start with these five insights.

How to access Instagram Insights

Your instagram profile needs to be a business account in order to be able to access the insights available to you. If it isn’t already, go to your profile in the app and click the three lines top right. From here click settings - account - switch account type. 

You must also have a business facebook page to link your business instagram account to, so make sure you have that set up as well.

Once set up correctly, to access Insights go back to your profile and click the three lines, then insights. It may not seem like much initially but once you get stuck into it you’ll find a whole world of instagram information waiting to be found.

You can also access individual grid post insights on the posts themselves, by clicking ‘view insights’ that should now appear under every post you share.

3 Instagram Insights to focus on 

Audience 

Clicking on the audience section of insights will take you in to some overall statistics like number of followers, and growth including new followers and unfollows. For this quick snapshot to tell you valuable information for content planning, don’t focus too much on the follower activity. 

Instead, look at your audience and ask yourself - who are they and when are they online?

Scrolling down will show you demographics like location by city and country, age range, gender, and most active times. Depending on your business type you may be interested in different aspects of this section, but in general the key ones are age range and most active times by day and by hour. 

Knowing the demographics will show if you are hitting your target market, or if your target market is different to what you anticipated allowing you to adapt your content appropriately. 

Most importantly though for content planning is when are they online? This will allow you to plan all your posts for when your audience will be active, or at very least your key important posts. It’s worth testing this at different times to give a more detailed picture, but in general it’s a good guide. 

Follows/Unfollows

It’s easy to get very hung up on follower size, but it really isn’t the be all and end all, especially for Instagram when it can fluctuate a lot. The main thing is growing an engaged audience, so an audience that is genuinely interested in following you and seeing your content.

Having a smaller audience that loves what you post, engage with your content, and are likely to buy or take up your service is much more beneficial than a big passive audience. Read that again!

The instagram algorithm makes it difficult, so don’t worry too much about small numbers of unfollows, but it’s useful to check sometimes if there are spikes in unfollows. What content did you post that day that your followers didn’t like? Did you post too many times, or not at all? 

Answering these questions can give you a good idea of what your followers don’t like to see, which is as important when planning your content as what they do like.

Saves 

Saves are one of the best indications of what your audience want to see from you, but some overlook their importance in favour of how many likes or comments a post gets. Saving posts to collections is a way for users to organise the posts they like, which similar to saving pins on Pinterest indicates one very useful thing - they plan to come back to it.

Saving a post means they find it valuable. Maybe they want to purchase a product featured, or you’ve provided some useful information, tips or points of interest in the caption. Looking at your most saved posts is likely to give you really obvious information about what sort of thing works for your profile.

To see your most saved posts go to Insights - Content you shared. Then alter the three filters at the top to ‘Any’, ‘Saves’ and the time frame you want to see, usually 30 days. This will show you all the posts that have been saved in order, and it shows you how many saves each one got. 

It’s not proven to work every time, as so many factors influence the instagram algorithm, but usually the more saves a post gets the more engagement it will get in terms of likes and comments. Instagram learns it’s good content so will push it more. For you and your planning, it helps to know what your audience find valuable.

Now you’ve found this section of Instagram analytics, you’ll see there are so many other metrics you could look at depending on what your goals are and what is important to you. Change saves to ‘likes’, ‘reach’ or ‘follows which will also tell you what people are enjoying from you, and what brings in new followers for audience growth. 

Spend some time going through the Instagram Insights, to really inform your next monthly content plan, and over time you’re likely to see much stronger results. It’s a sure way to get to know what works and what doesn’t so you can plan accordingly. 

If your business could use some Instagram or social media TLC, get in touch with the experienced team at Wriggle, who would be happy to discuss your needs and goals.

While you’re here, don’t forget to follow Wriggle on Instagram!