Back in May of 2016 I read that Instagram was testing out analytics features for Instagram business users. At the time I didn’t think anything of it since my account is not recognized as a business. The feature was to give marketers a more accurate view of their followers’ behaviour, so that their brands can accommodate accordingly.
Instagram Insights for Regular Users
This was great for businesses, but what about the regular users? I believe it was a month or so ago that I believe I passed by an article somewhere on the Internet stating that Insights was slowly rolling out to all users. I have no idea where I read this but I figure if I didn’t see any changes on my Instagram account, then I was not affected by this.
I completely forgot about all of that, until today. Today I finally got my notice saying I was able to get more insight into my followers by clicking on a new icon that is now on the top right corner of my profile page. If you don’t have that icon yet, I’m sure in due time the rollout will come to your account too. Just be patient. Alternatively you could convert your account to a business account, in which you’ll automatically get this feature added in as well.
Having a quick look into Instagram Insights, it’s a relatively straightforward feature that even has explanations as to what each graph means. The layout is clean and easy to read, and gives you the data upfront.
My data currently only shows insights for the last three photos that I uploaded. But as time progresses and I upload more, this data should be updated to reflect this.
I can readily see that of my 132k followers, 60 percent are males. The majority of my followers lay in the 18-24 age range, and come from the United States.
Why I don’t have followers on Tuesday or Wednesday has yet to be found. I do know for certain that I’ve had engagement on those days. Perhaps the data only pulls for the last 5 days and that blank on Tuesday and Wednesday refers to last week? Today is a Tuesday after all. And the top city that my followers are from…are from Riyadh? Where is that?
It also looks like I should be posting pictures right around 1pm, where the majority of my followers are active on Instagram.
What marketers may be most interested in is your Impressions, Reach, and Engagement. As stated right on Insights, Impressions is the total number of times your post has been seen, while Reach refers to the total number of times your post has been seen by unique visitors. Your Engagement level combines your Likes and Comments (you can see separate statistics for Likes and Comments as well).
It’s no secret the engagement level on my Instagram account isn’t very high, but I knew that this wasn’t reflective of how many people actually saw my photos. The Impressions and Reach stats prove this and I’m happy to see this kind of information on each of my photos.
These stats are available through the Insights button, or there’s a convenient Insights link under each of my photos when you view your photo. At the time of this posting, I can only see Insights for the last three photos I’ve uploaded.
You can see the Insights without having to leave the page, which is pretty convenient. I can see this being useful if a marketer wants to view their insight for a particular photo that has been uploaded during a campaign.
All of these insights will give me a good idea of what type of photos people generally like, are more prone to engaging with, and will tell me when I should be posting if I care for any of these statistics.
Do you have Instagram Insights on your account? Do they reflect what you thought about your Instagram photos? Do you even care about Instagram Insights? Let me know in the comments below!