Why Measure?
Have you ever felt like your business isn’t getting anywhere on Instagram? You are producing high quality content, engaging with customers, and keeping up with the latest trends. However, you aren’t achieving the digital presence you’d like for your brand. In reality, there is much more to understand about Instagram than just that. No marketer can have a complete understanding of their presence, audience, and opportunity on the platform without measuring specific metrics.
Identify Goals:
Before you begin to measure your metrics, it’s important to identify your goals and objectives. What do you want to discover? You may want to find trends in you’re posting frequency or how a promotion increased brand awareness. Comments, followers, and likes can be more meaningful than just showcasing your popularity. These metrics can help determine your leads and conversion rate from Instagram. Content measurement uncovers if you’ve met your goals and objectives or not. Being a data driven brand can tremendously set you apart from competitors. Don’t just do things for the sake of doing them — make data driven actions when it comes to your Instagram account.
What to Measure?
Lisa Kalner Williams, Content Marketing Director of Agorapulse, outlined important metrics to monitor. Here are 5 that relate to followers, likes, comments, URLs, and the timing of posts.
- Follower Growth Rate: The rate at which you attain followers can indicate if your Instagram strategy is working. By simply tracking the amount of followers your brand has on an Excel document and using a simple formula, you can identify interesting trends that tie your follower rate rise or fall to your Instagram activities.
- Engagement as Percentage of Total Followers: Calculate your brand’s engagement percentage by adding your average likes and comments for the month and dividing it by the number of followers your brand has. Compare the rates between months and find out what worked and didn’t work.
- Engagement per Post: Add the number of likes and comments you received over the last seven posts. Divide that number by seven to calculate your average engagement per post. Compare this average to the previous seven days and determine why it might be lower or higher.
- Clickthroughs on URLs: When it comes to Instagram, the URL you want to monitor is the one in your bio. Use a bit.ly link to not only shorten your link but to track how many users visited your site from Instagram.
- Best Day/Time to post: One metric that is often overlooked and should be examined is when you are posting. Per request from The Huffington Post, an app called, Later, that schedules and manages Instagram posts, performed an analysis on more than 60,000 posts to see what time of day is the best time. It turns out that on average, the best time to post is 2:00p.m. and 5:00p.m. EST if you really want to get your audience’s attention. The team also discovered that 9:00a.m and 6:00p.m. EST are the worst times to post. Wednesdays beat out the other days of the week as the best day to post. Keeping this is mind when you post is easy and doesn’t cost a thing!
Getting Started:
All of these measurements may sound like a lot of work! The good news is that once you get organized and begin to track your brand’s metrics on Instagram, it will become second nature. Come up with a system that works for you. Try inputing data and formulas into an Excel document manually, or check out some popular, free Instagram analytical tools. Or do a combination of both! Pete Schauer from SocialMediaToday.com, outlined 5 of the best, free analytical tools for Instagram:
What did you discover about your Instagram activities through content measurement? Let us know below and don’t forget to follow us @hashtag4thegram!
LUC Marketing 399 