If you think Instagram is just for posting pictures with your latest outfit or your last vacation, think again. With over 800 million active users each month, the platform is currently one of the fastest growing social media platforms. This presents a huge opportunity for brands, so don’t hesitate to take advantage of Instagram marketing.
Why use Instagram marketing?
More people are actively engaging with Instagram than with Twitter and for the first time ever, Facebook reported a fall in daily active users.
As your customer’s online behavior changes, so should your marketing strategy. Instagram marketing offers many unique benefits you can’t get elsewhere in the social media marketing space.
With this in mind, Instagram is now one of the most attractive options for marketers trying to reach their target audience on social media.
Fewer distractions for users
Instagram’s mobile-friendly layout has fewer distractions than other social media platforms. One post is likely to take up an entire screen, so users can really focus on your content, and your post won’t get lost in the clutter.
Add in the platform’s algorithm and access to Facebook Ads, and as a brand, you have far greater opportunity to get seen on Instagram than many other platforms.
Create your brand’s visual identity
Since a lot of consumer-brand engagement takes place online, you’ll want to have a strong, consistent visual brand identity that people can easily recognize. And what social media platform can better embody the phrase “a picture’s worth a thousand words”?
Instagram helps you build the visual part of your brand, and the emotions you want your user to feel when interacting with it. This gives you a voice, a story, and more with just a quick glance at your profile.
Instagram Insights
Instagram knows brands and marketers rely on data to make decisions and adapt their strategy, so they’ve provided Instagram business accounts the Insights tool. This way, you can find a comprehensive look at your follower demographics and how users are engaging with your content.
The metrics provided could be used in so many different ways and situations, depending on your specific audience, company, and your goals in using the platform.
Each set of metrics helps marketers answer a unique question about their performance, strategy, and more at a quick glance. Let’s take a look at how each of them can help your marketing efforts!
Account-based metrics
If your page views/number of likes is consistently low, it’s a sign you’re not actively engaging the right people. You might need to try different strategies to start getting your posts in front of your audience.
If you have a large following but aren’t getting a lot of clicks back to your website it could be a good indicator that you need to do a better job of guiding people or possibly even invest in ads.
Audience-based metrics
A lot of engagement and followers is great, but if you’re not attracting people who are actually interested in your brand, company, or service offerings, it won’t help generate new business.
These audience metrics can help you determine if your current strategy is engaging the people you want.
Post-based metrics
While account-based metrics help you determine overall performance, post-based metrics can help you figure out the how each post is affecting the bottom line. Also, you can use these metrics to improve your strategy over time and adapt how you post to how users are interacting with the content.
For example, if you find that one post is performing better, you could try to replicate that strategy with posts moving forward to see if you can get the same result.
Stories & Live metrics
One of the best uses of these metrics is to determine if your audience is interested in these type of content. Because both stories & live videos are relatively new to Instagram, analyzing the numbers will tell you if it’s worth the effort of posting here and if your audience is actually engaging.