Are you trying to grow your Instagram followers and build an audience for your business, personal brand or blog? With so many statistics and metrics to monitor on Instagram, it can be difficult to keep track of the most important ones. In this post, we’ll show you how to use your Instagram analytics to grow your followers organically – without having to engage in odd tactics such as buying followers.

Why you need to track your Instagram analytics

Instagram is an amazing platform to attract new customers and engage with your audience. But without analytics, you’ll end up sharing content that YOU THINK they’ll like and hope for people to engage with it. But that’s a mistake! Analytics help you understand what you’re doing right and it can also stop you from making mistakes that can hurt your growth.

Ready to start tracking the BEST Instagram insights for growth?

Keep reading.

5 Ways to Leverage Instagram Analytics To Grow Your Followers

1. Choose the best metrics for followers growth

To make the best of your Instagram strategy, you shouldn’t track every metric. That would be very time consuming and unless you’re a social media analyst, you’re not going to find all the data helpful. Instead, choose metrics that are relevant for your goal.

Want to grow your Instagram followers? Focus on these metrics:

• Followers
• Impressions
• Reach
• Top posts
• Active hours
• Top hashtags
• Engagement rate

Pro tip: Quickly track your stats from one dashboard using Sharemyinsights.com

2. Improve your Instagram strategy with insights so you can grow your followers

Things change very fast on social media and you need to stay on top of your starts to make better decisions. Use real-time data to track your performance against your goal and make updates to your Instagram strategy as you progress. Once you find that your followers don’t engage with a certain type of content, you can quickly react and change your strategy, so you can continue to grow.

Many factors impact on whether you grow on Instagram. But we’ve summarised the top most common in the checklist below:

• effective audience targeting
• relevant and valuable content pillars
• engaging captions
• effective hashtags
• promotional campaigns (paid ads)
• collaborations with other accounts
• sponsorships
• influencer posts

… and more.

Ask yourself: “Does my current content strategy help me grow my followers?” And “What can I do differently to get more followers?”

3. Create posts that your audience loves

Stop guessing what type of content will or won’t resonate with your followers. Your Instagram analytics will show you which are the top posts by engagement, reach or likes. So you can create more posts like that and schedule them in advance knowing that they’ll love it!

Use your stats to find out:

• Do images or carousel posts perform better than videos?
• Does the choice of colour or imagery have any impact on top posts?
• Which one gets more likes: educational, motivational or funny content?

Example:

In the last 30 days, carousels and images showing my face performed better than motivational quotes and educational content. Also, the paid content had the best reach. 

4. Connect with your audience

Instagram is the #1 platform for engagement, so if you’re not making use of it to build a community and relationship with your followers you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Track your post engagement stats and use them to understand which posts are the most liked, commented, saved and shared on the platform.

Think: “What makes people comment more on certain posts?” And don’t forget about Instagram stories! Stories are great for building that 1:1 connection with your audience. You can also track Stories insights and see how they performed.

5. Monitor your insights regularly

Once you have decided on the best metrics to track on Instagram, you can create a worksheet and update it with monthly stats. But if you find that tedious, just know that there are analytics  apps that allow you to create your custom report templates based on your stats. This will make your job easier, especially if you’re a social media manager and building reports for your clients is time-consuming.

Pro tip: Let the analytics software do the hard work. Just set up auto-reports to receive weekly/monthly reports sent to your inbox.

Conclusion

Now you know every metric you need to track if you want to grow your followers on Instagram. Let us know, which metrics are you going to track?