Now that you have taken the step in furthering your businesses social media presence, it is time for you to start understanding your company’s analytics and insights. The best way to do that is to you make your social media a “Business Account” on Instagram.
So, let’s get started.
- Open the app, and click edit profile
- Then switch your account to “professional”
- Select your business niche
- Finally, click OK to save the changes
- If you are having any trouble this is a link with help. https://help.instagram.com/502981923235522
Now that your profile has been updated, your account is going to look a little different. Your professional dashboard should appear on the profile tab, when you click on that it will show you your pages insights for the last 30 days. The information you see here will help you gather a deeper insight on how your page is growing, which post get the most engagement, and watch your following rise.
Insights can vary in many ways from follower count, to post interactions and Instagram gives a ton of different insight options. When you click on your new professional dashboard on your profile it shows not only insights but also gives you and your business tips and resources on how to differentiate and get your content out there more than ever. Also, once you are a professional account you can create a shop and produce branded content with other creators, this doesn’t pertain as much to the analytics side but just goes to show how supportive and helpful Instagram has been.
When you switch to a professional account instagram will start collecting insights for you and organize them into 30 day periods. They will always track accounts reached, accounts engaged, total followers (gained or lost with percentage change) for your profile. Then when it comes to individual posts they will track those same numbers along with post interactions (likes, comments, shares and saves), how many people viewed your profile and how many turned to followers.
As you can imagine these numbers can be very effective in letting your business know how your social media account is performing. Keeping track of followers lost and gained is a good way to see how many people you are reaching and if your content is good enough to keep them around or interest new people in following you. This is one of the more broad insights though and can sometimes be misleading. One of the most important metrics is accounts reached, you would think that this is just your follower count but that is false. People that stumble across the post can share it and it can reach a ton more people than just your following. This is important because you want to know how many people actually saw your post and if it is being shared around or not. The problem with assuming you’re doing well if you have a decent amount of followers is that some followers are inactive so you’re not actually reaching them.
The next biggest insight that Instagram provides you is post engagement. Engagement covers all interactions with your posts from likes and comments to shares and saves. Obviously, this is important to know as a business because it can show you what posts are getting more interaction and appreciation from customers. If one of your posts has terrible engagement in comparison to another post then maybe as a business you stray away from those posts that aren’t working as well. As a business you should always be shooting to increase this engagement number and doing whatever that takes. If your post is getting more likes, comments and shares then that means people are enjoying it and it is inevitable that more people see the post or posts in the future. Sharing on social media is a special thing because the audience is almost unlimited, if you can push shares on your posts, do it. Engagement doesn’t stop at just interactions with the post, it also tracks how many people engage with your profile because of the post. It will track in detail how many people clicked onto your profile from the post and also how many people followed after checking out the profile. If a post causes consumers to look at your profile and maybe even follow, that is the best outcome.
As you can see Instagram and the insights they are offering are extremely helpful to business in many ways. Not only do the insights track profile data but also data revolving around posts. This can really help business’ that are struggling getting a foot hold in social media to establish their ground and really see what is actually working and what is not. Make sure to follow these steps and take advantage of this incredible insight that is being offered to business accounts and if you have any further interest, check out this link! https://www.facebook.com/help/instagram/788388387972460?helpref=faq_content
-Connor Mitchell
Teaching Social Media 