If you have a business account you know that your account collects insights on you. If you have a regular account, now you know! Instagram is my preferred marketplace when it comes to blogging, branding, and promoting. So if you have a brand make sure your Instagram game is 👌🏽. It matters and it will really help your company grow.
Whenever I look for places to eat, shop, or explore I usually check if they have an Insta because Yelp isn’t as helpful for me.
There is a lot of unique information that your data can tell you from just one week alone. You can drive your business and platform if you maximize on the data itself. It also gives you an idea to see how well or poorly you’re doing. I check this daily but that’s because it can change any day.
If you are posting consistently, listening to the data, and leveraging your own insights your platform can be a HUGE success.
There are a lot of terms that’s on the Instagram insights page but for the purpose of this I want to explain what my impressions and followers tell me.
Impressions: measures all the times your posts were seen. This accounts for duplicates too. So one person can see the same post 4 times in the same week and that will count as 4 times.
Reach: How many new/unique accounts visit your content.
In the past 7 days, I gained 28 followers which puts me at 905 (woot woot!). That’s AWESOME!! That’s 4 followers a day and I’ve only posted once on my feed, except for Instagram Stories.
DISCLAIMER: I wrote this on Monday. My numbers have since then changed but this is for example purposes.
My impressions this week took a pretty big hit but I am not too worried. So I have a total of 5,676 impressions. That means my posts were seen 5,676 times which is 4,796 LESS than last week. That makes sense because I didn’t post too much on social media last week. I am not worried about that because the more I post the more people see my content thus increasing the impressions. 
Other things I see are:
What this data tells me is that in the past 7 days (since last Monday) one more person visited my profile, 99 new accounts did not see my posts, I’ve had 19 less website clicks, and one person did not click on my email link.
SO from the outside this is really bad. BUT to offer some backstory (get it, story telling?) last week I didn’t post as often and the week before was a big launch week so people were still engaging with my content last week but of course today they weren’t as high because it’s Monday and usually things pick up for me later in the day anyway.
Do I find this past week a successful one? Not really. As a brand, I have a hard time figuring out what “success” means for me so as I pan that out. I don’t think that this week was unsuccessful.
The insights page is always updating. What is true within one hour can be totally false in another. It’s meant to give you an overview not an exact number. As I am writing this 3 people have followed me since I put these screenshots in. I still wanted to write this post because I think a lot of people don’t know what there data is telling them.
Next we are going to drill down into the followers. As you can see 50% of my followers are male and the other 50% are female. I remember a couple of days ago it was 51/49 so I find this interesting. The gender doesn’t matter so much to me but location does. 
So, where do most of my followers live?
Not surprisingly, Greensboro because I live here but others are San Jose, Charlotte, Detroit, and Raleigh as you can see. If you are wanting to know when to post, knowing the location of your followers matters. So if I post at noon, that’s 9 am for my San Jose friends so they won’t see it until later that day which could drive my engagement down. I usually post whenever but if I am planning to launch something I want to maximize on that sweet spot posting hour which is Thursday night at 8 pm EST.
There are other ways to leverage the information in your insights page but I am no social media marketing expert. I am going off my passion for data and wanted to share an overview of how I use my data and what my data tells me. This was a really fun post for me to write so I hope you all enjoy reading it.
More posts like this will be coming so stay tuned
Is Anyone Really Listening? 