Instagram Insights are coming. Here’s the low-down…
After leaving marketers in the dark for years, Instagram Insights is to be rolled out in the coming weeks. This should finally shed some light on who is seeing your Instagram content and how they are engaging with it.
From a business perspective, we expect Instagram Insights to help us to make a stronger case for Instagram marketing and, as a result, drive increased investment in, what is currently, the fastest growing and most engaging social network around.
Although Instagram hasn’t formally announced the release of Insights, several screenshots (using the old Instagram look and feel) were published on the Later.com blog, which is owned by Instagram. These indicate that two types of analytics will soon be launched: follower demographics and post insights.
Instagram Follower demographics
Follower demographics:
- Gender
- Age
- Location (country/city)
- Followers acquired per hour / day
Instagram follower locations
Post insights:
- Impressions – total number of impressions received by your posts
- Reach – unique accounts that have viewed your content
- Website clicks – clicks on your profile URL
Instagram – best posts
In addition to this, you will also have some insights into when you followers are using Instagram, to help you schedule posts (though the platform’s new non-chronological algorithm may disrupt the value of this), plus a visual table of your post popular posts by impressions – to help you see which posts are delivering results.
Instagram membership growth and usage continues to surpass even the most optimistic of predictions – earlier in 2016 eMarketer predicted that one third of US mobile phone users will be on Instagram by the end of the year – yet take-up by brands has been hampered by a lack of reliable insights and limited advertising options.
It’s not known when these features will be made globally available (within weeks, apparently), but Instagram Insights are an extremely welcome development for marketers. If the platform can surprise us by launching follower ads, 2016 will become the year of Instagram.
