How to utilize Instagram data to improve engagement

Want to learn how to use Instagram analytics to dial-in your content and understand your audience better?

Here’s how:

Create a business account. This lets you see real-time metrics and performance data, giving valuable insight into how followers are finding and responding to your content.
Access insights from your account page to track and measure your engagement.
Use engagement metrics to see which posts get a larger response from your audience.
Consider working with a third-party Instagram analytics tool to measure engagement metrics in a more cohesive way.

Hi everyone, I'm Haley Dasovich. I'm a YouTuber and social media coach based in San Francisco. And today we're going to talk about how to use Instagram's data tools to boost your reach and engagement. If you're looking to make your business or personal brand really stand out on Instagram and use the platform strategically, you're going to need to create a business account. A business account lets you see real time metrics on how your posts and stories are performing, which will give you valuable insight into how followers are finding your content and responding to it.

It's free, it's easy to understand and shows you overall how your content is performing. So let's dive into some of these Instagram metrics. To access your Instagram data, you need to switch to a business account, if you haven't already. This is simple. Just tap the three bars in the upper right corner, top account and scroll to the bottom where it says switch to professional account. Once you switch, you'll see insights for any content you post after you've made the switch to a business account.

You can find insights data in three different places in the Instagram app. To access insights from your account page, tap the bar graph icon in the upper right corner. The first and most important metric you need to track is engagement. To measure your engagement it's useful to look at a few different metrics. Likes comments, clicks, and brand tags and mentions. Engagement rates.

Tell you if people are interested in your products, image, message and ultimately your brand and messaging. If they aren't liking or commenting, then they're not as interested as they could be. You can use these engagement metrics to paint a better picture of what your followers want to see. What kind of posts get a larger response? What are your followers most likely to ask a question or leave a comment? You can definitely keep track of all of these metrics on your own.

But working with an Instagram analytics tool will help provide you all of this information in a cohesive way. Plus it means that you're not going back and counting the metrics manually. Here is a list of five third-party apps that offer a robust analytics tool for Instagram. Sprout Social, HootSuite, Keyhole, Later and Iconosquare. If you don't know which activations are stirring interests, then you can't really recreate them.

So consider using one of these tools to understand your content and how well it's performing. Then you can recreate the content that your followers want to engage with.