Wait, you can use Instagram for advertising?
Of course you can, it’s 2022! I’m going to go ahead and assume that anyone reading this article is familiar with the Meta owned social media platform Instagram, right? Okay good, I’m more than elated that we’re all familiar with IG, but just incase you aren’t in the loop, IG is a photo and video sharing app. Over the last few years, Instagram has become one of the top marketing tools for brands, influencers or just any person or team running a social media marketing campaign in general. Today, Instagram has roughly 1 billion active monthly users, and that number of users leaves a lot of room for reaching potential consumers and generating conversion. There is no doubt anymore on the future of marketing, as many social media outlets have taken over by storm.
What are analytics?
Analytics, in social media, are used to optimize a marketing campaign in order to create the highest return on investment. Data and analytics help you measure the impact of your marketing efforts across different channels to see if there’s something you need to do differently — like target a different audience, post at a certain time of day, or experiment with a new content format.
Social media analytics helps companies address these experiences and use them to:
Spot trends related to offerings and brands
Understand conversations — what is being said and how it is being received
Derive customer sentiment towards products and services
Gauge response to social media and other communications
Identify high-value features for a product or service
Uncover what competitors are saying and its effectiveness
Map how third-party partners and channels may affect performance
How to use analytics for your Instagram content
With the information that has already been given, you can begin to take your first step into using analytics for Instagram. One of the amazing features on the app is that it has its own in-house analytics tool. Sure it may not be as powerful as Google Analytics, something we will dive into later, but it has proven a useful tool for small businesses and content creators. Insights allows a user to get up to date information on both metrics (as opposed to analytics, metrics are simply a data that is collectible while analytics are perceptions drawn from data) and simplified analytics. For example, if you have the business account option set up on IG, you’re allowed to view things such as the accounts (users) that have engaged with your post or account, accounts reached, total followers and the percentage of male vs female engagement.
The image above is to illustrate what Insights looks like. There are also other tools for social media analytics, such as Google Analytics, which is a much more in-depth and preferred tools among marketing research teams. Google Analytics is used to track website performance and collect visitor insights. It can help organizations determine top sources of user traffic, gauge the success of their marketing activities and campaigns, track goal completions (such as purchases, adding products to carts), discover patterns and trends in user engagement and obtain other visitor information such as demographics. Small and medium-sized retail websites often use Google Analytics to obtain and analyze various customer behavior analytics, which can be used to improve marketing campaigns, drive website traffic and better retain visitors.
Key Points
Analytics are a great tool for not only gathering information, but being able to draw connections and figure out how consumers work, which leads to marketing teams being able to create a plan to optimize their campaign. whether you are a one man crew, or a fortune 500 business, implementing the study of analytics will undeniably have a drastic effect on the potential of what you’re marketing, due to the fact that you will be able to identify strengths and weaknesses, and see just exactly what works best for you.
Teaching Social Media 