A Picture’s Worth

Nick Singer, Account Coordinator
Instagram recently rolled out its highly anticipated “Insights” feature, which provides analytics about a user’s account directly within the app. With over 500 million people using Instagram, this tool will have a huge impact for big social media users and PR folks who run clients’ Instagram accounts.
Once you add Insights to your account, the initial screen you are shown is a scrolling field that displays impressions/reach (weekly); below that you can see your top posts in the last seven days; and below that you get your followers info.

Insights allows you to break down your followers interaction by gender, age range, top location (by city or country), and followers by hours or days. You can also look at engagement, reach, impressions, likes, and comments over a specific time frame from seven days to two years to build a detailed picture of your analytics.
You can also select to view information for photos, videos, or both. However, regardless of what metric and time frame is chosen, all that you get is a bar graph without numbers, which is a HUGE bummer in terms of getting a truly accurate understanding of your followers.

The thing that stands out for me as the best feature is the followers info by hours and days. A graphical representation of exactly what days followers are active and at what times will allow users to schedule posts during the high traffic times to get the most reach/impressions possible – even if all we get to see if a bar, instead of the raw numbers.
I will definitely be setting up a plan to monitor numbers and compare what I am doing on a week to week basis to test out different strategies. The Insights roll-out is still ongoing; I can’t wait to start using this awesome tool so I can utilize and strategize posts in a more effective way.
Keep on Grammin.

How have you used Insights to develop your Instagram strategy? Leave a comment below or tweet me @nicksinger91.