Growing an Instagram following can be a tricky business: success feels like luck and some of your best posts go un-hearted. But if your literal business depends on getting more eyes on your ‘gram, it’s easy to get discouraged when your efforts go unnoticed.

The nice thing about Instagram, though, is that it can be effective marketing no matter the size of your brand. From a one-person operation to a multi-continent juggernaut, anyone can find their audience on Instagram with a solid strategy based on actual data. Which we, hopefully, will help you find. 

Before moving forward on any Instagram strategy, you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with Instagram Insights first. 

Use Insights to Measure Your Instagram Content 

You can’t trust the likes on your posts. The best way to keep track of your performance is through Instagram Insights.

Insights is a free tool built into the Instagram platform, and it helps creators follow their own post and reel metrics. The first step when examining your metrics is to find out what kind of engagement you’re seeking.

1. Determine and Track Your Engagement Metrics

Basically, you can’t know if your Instagram strategy is working if you haven’t decided what “working” looks like for you. How does your brand measure success? Now is the time to figure that out. 

Traditionally, engagement has been the gold standard of social media heat. If audiences are interacting with your content, odds are you’ve struck a nerve. Insights helps you track the number of plays, views, replies, shares, likes, and saves, providing you with a full raft of options for the kind of engagement you’re looking for. 

This isn’t just there to make you feel good about your content, though. How an audience engages with your posts is just as important as the numbers themselves. While most engagement is “good,” a piece of content provoking a lot of shares and one provoking a flurry of comments is affecting your audience in a very different way. 

2. Find Your Best Content

How do you know how to succeed if you haven’t examined how you’ve done it in the past? There’s no need to reinvent the wheel: if a type of content is performing well for you, discovering it and emulating it can only help.

Your Instagram content that performs well should be identified through insights and then broken down into categories of success. You don’t want analysis like “posts with this vibe do the best.” By breaking down your top performers and looking at each possible avenue of possibility, you can replicate your success.

Are your photos or your videos getting more views and engagement? What hashtags hit for you? Is there subject matter you post about that sparks conversation? What days did your content perform better? What times of day? Instagram Insights lets you get as granular as you need to.

Once you have these categories broken down and quantified by past success, you’ll have the bare bones of a strategy you can use to create more content that resonates. 

3. Identify Your Insta Audience

If you have even a modest following on Instagram, your content is going to get in front of multiple demographics. But at the end of the day, there are really only two important demographics: the one you want, and the one you don’t want. 

Those demographics will be unique for every brand, based on trends in the industry or in your product. You’ll know them well: the people who tend to buy your product or service, the people who spend money where you want them to spend it, are the people you want your Instagram content to reach. 

The “wrong” demographic isn’t necessarily a bad thing: press is press. But, if your content is being shared, liked, or commented on by a demo that doesn’t fit your ideal buyer profile, your content may not be tuned toward your ideal audience.  

Instagram Insights lets you look at “Accounts reached” and “Accounts engaged.” Both categories can be explored further, down to gender, age, city, and country, over whatever time period you need, helping you find the demographics you need. 

Data and Experience Make for Stronger Strategies

So, to sum up: Insights is free and relatively easy to use. It’ll help you find how people are engaging with your Instagram content, how to find and analyze your top-performing content, and help identify the demographics you’re reaching. 

Each of these three is a vital pillar for your social media strategy (which apparently is a triangular building). 

If you need help finding and reaching your Instagram goals, as well as setting KPIs for yourself and even how to engage existing influencers on Instagram, reach out to Inspira Marketing today. We love helping brands put together their custom social media strategies.  

This article has been published in the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) Marketing Knowledge Center. Click here to visit their blog.