Sarah Mourtos We are decoding Instagram Insights and how you can use this information to help grow your audience and business.
With many spas and clinics on an extended pause due to COVID-19 and others working at reduced capacity, now is a great time to brush up on the skills that become neglected during peak times. Social media is one of the most vital tools to remain in touch with clients and remind them of the fantastic services you offer for when things return to ‘normal’.
However, with all the social media metrics, it can be confusing on what means what. That’s why we put together this handy guide to help you decode the numbers and what they mean. We will give you a quick rundown of the basics, which ones are important and what you should be tracking.
While there are a plethora of social media platforms to analyse, we will mainly be looking at the platform we love the most, Instagram. Your account will need to be a business profile to access this information. You can view most of these insights based on an individual post, stories or your overall profile.
Enough of the housekeeping, let’s begin.
The Basics
Likes – This metric indicates how many accounts liked a single post. It is simple, but a great way to track how a post performs in comparison to previous posts.
Comments – This metric indicates how many accounts have commented on a single post. If your post gets people commenting, this is always a good indication you’re on the right track. An engaged and active audience is much better than a passive and silent one.
Saves – This metric indicates how many accounts have saved your post. You can not view who has saved your post unlike likes.
Impressions – Here is where it gets a bit more complicated. This metric applies to both posts, stories and your account as a whole. For the sake of simplicity, we will talk about it in the context of a post. Impressions indicate the total number of times a post has been seen. Think eyeballs for this one. The same account could view a post three separate times, and that would correlate to three impressions. Instagram also breaks this down into where people have seen a post, whether it’s via their feed, your profile, explore or other.
Reach – This metric is the total number of unique accounts that have seen a post or story. Unlike impression, this number indicates people (accounts) rather than eyeballs. One account will equal one in reach.
Dig A Little Deeper
These metrics track your account as a whole.
Followers – How many accounts follow your account. This one is pretty straight forward. Your audience analytics is also broken down into the age, gender, location, hours active and days active of your followers.
Website Clicks – This metric indicates how many accounts clicked on your website URL in your bio.
Profile Visits – This metric indicates how many accounts (followers or not) viewed your account.
What Can I Learn From This?
You can gain plenty of insights from social media metrics, but it’s mostly useless unless you’re working towards a goal. Monitoring these numbers around the clock is time-consuming and overwhelming. Instead, pick a few to watch based on the goals you’d like to achieve. If you would like to create a more engaged audience, keep an eye on comments. If you’d like to drive people towards your website, monitor how many website clicks you receive.
Social media can seem like a complicated world to conquer, but success often boils down to being interested in your account. If you find a post performs unusually well, identify what you did differently and replicate it! Sometimes curiosity doesn’t kill the cat.
