Can you tell the difference between Instagram Marketing impressions and reach? And do you know the percentage of your followers who engage with your Instagram posts and stories? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, it’s time to acknowledge that tracking the most crucial Instagram metrics is vital to growing your Instagram account and building an engaged followers’ base.
With more than 500+ million daily active users globally, ranking second behind Facebook for the social network with the highest daily logins, Instagram remains one of the largest social media networks for businesses when it comes to marketing. However, like with any other social media platform, there’s not much point in utilizing Instagram for marketing if you’re not actively tracking performance and seeing results.
So, whether you’re trying to track your business profile’s analytics or willing to evaluate an influencer’s account, below are the three key metrics to measure the success of each Instagram account. Afterward, you can include these metrics in a social media report or dedicated Instagram dashboard to track your Instagram marketing efforts and if they are delivering the desired results.
Follower Growth Rate
Of course, having a high follower count can add brand credibility and serve as an ego boost. Still, it doesn’t necessarily say that much about the health of your Instagram strategy and marketing campaigns. After all, nowadays, many businesses trick themselves into subscribing to widespread follower growth tools like Social Meep and risk their accounts getting permanently banned from the network, only to get a high follower count of profiles that will never actually interact with their account or campaigns.
On the other hand, your follower growth rate can give you a better idea of whether your business is expanding its reach on the network and catching new people’s attention. Or, in other words, the way your follower count changes is usually more important than the actual number of followers when evaluating your Instagram performance efforts.
For example, suppose you get 100 new followers in a month. If you started with 1000 followers, that means that your profile’s follower growth rate is 10%, which is fantastic. Nevertheless, if you started with 11,000 followers and got 100 new ones that month, your follower growth rate would be less than 1%, which indicates that your Instagram marketing efforts are stagnating, and it may be the right time to try out new strategies.
Engagement Per Follower
Do you know that 70% of all Instagram posts don’t get seen by anyone? In that manner, all of the followers in the world won’t drive any new business for your company if your followers don’t see and engage with your postings. Moreover, with the network’s constantly updated algorithms, follower engagement is now more important than ever to ensure that people see your posts and campaigns.
To do that, you should start measuring the engagement per follower, which will effectively let you monitor just how interested your audience is in your posts. For example, this key metric is fundamental if you’re evaluating a partnership with an influencer because you surely don’t want to pay for a sponsored post on an account without any real engagement.
Like with follower growth rate, you don’t want to look only at the raw numbers, as it’s essential to compare the number of comments and likes with the size of the audience. To calculate your engagement per follower, look at the total number of comments and likes you get during a particular period and divide that number by the total number of followers you had during that time. For instance, if you got 155 likes and comments last month and you had 1200 followers, your follower engagement rate was 13% for the month.
Instagram Stories Engagement
Instagram stories, which can be either photos or videos, are different from regular content as they disappear after 24 hours, making them a bit more challenging to track engagement. However, you should pay attention to two primary metrics to measure the success of your marketing efforts when it comes to stories: views and exits.
The views uncover how many unique viewers saw your business’s story. Typically, the longer you are on the network and the more followers you get, your story views should increase over time. Your exits can uncover which slide people were on when they exited your stories. For that reason, exits are an excellent way to determine what holds your followers’ interest and what doesn’t.
Final Thoughts
There’s no denying that Instagram is a fantastic social media channel to market your business. However, you should always keep in mind that if you want your Instagram marketing efforts to be profitable, you’ve got to track the right metrics regularly. Focus on the three key Instagram metrics mentioned above, and you’ll get a clearer picture of how your marketing efforts are performing.
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