If you market your company through social media sites like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, it’s useful to know which of your posts generate the most interest and how to translate that interest into sales. Many social media sites provide business owners with metrics that can help you develop a smarter social media strategy, leading to more of your products flying off the shelves.
Learn how you can use Instagram Insights to improve your business’s social media marketing strategy.
What are Instagram Insights?
Instagram Insights are key metrics available to users with an Instagram business account. They analyze the performance of your individual posts and audience demographics, and they also reveal how often users click through to your profile, website link, and contact information. Insights are available for any date range within the past 90 days.
How to access Instagram Insights
Using Instagram analytics is a straightforward process. If you have an Instagram business profile, it’s easy to view Insights. From your profile page in the Instagram mobile app, tap the “Professional dashboard” button near the top of the page and then tap “Account insights.” You can also tap the menu button in the top right-hand corner and then tap “Insights.” When you’ve accessed the Insights overview page, you can scroll through a variety of metrics, from the locations of your recent followers to interactions, profile visits, and website clicks generated through individual Instagram posts.
Troubleshooting tips
If you don’t see the option to access Insights, your brand’s Instagram profile may be set up as a personal account by default. To change your account to a business account, tap the menu button in the top right corner of your profile page, then tap “Settings and privacy.” From there, tap the “Accounts Center” option and then select “Account type and tools.” At the bottom of the screen, select the option “Switch to a professional account.”
Navigate through the prompts to choose a category that best describes your business. When asked if you are a business or a content creator, tap “Business.” Next, input your business’s contact information and choose whether you’d like to link your Instagram page to your Facebook page.
Instagram Insights components explained
Once you’ve learned how to access the various Instagram metrics offered through Insights, you can focus on the data that is most important for your particular business. Instagram Insights provides the following information:
- Accounts reached. Your Insight overview will display several key metrics, including accounts reached. Accounts reached is the number of unique accounts that have seen your content at least once in a specified time period up to 90 days, as well as the demographic information of those accounts, including country and city of origin, age ranges, and gender.
- Profile activity. The accounts reached tab also includes a Profile Activity section that shows how many people have visited your profile and how they’ve engaged with the clickable links and buttons—like the email button and business address link—at the top of the page.
- Accounts engaged. Accounts engaged is the number of unique accounts that have interacted with your content. This view also includes demographic information for the accounts you’ve engaged, including top countries, top cities, age ranges, and gender breakdown.
- Total followers. Total followers measures trends across your follower count (note that this feature only works if you have more than 100 followers). These data points include how many followers you’ve added or lost over a given period, such as the past week. It shows the location of your account’s followers, their age range, and the times of day they are most active—a key point that can help you know when to schedule your posts for the most impact.
- Content you shared. Insights gives you the power to dive into the stats for each specific Instagram post you make. These post performance metrics include impressions, likes, comments, shares, saves, profile and website visits, and discovery, which shows the number of accounts your post reached that were not your followers.
How to use Instagram Insights
According to Meta, Instagram’s parent company, 90% of Instagram users follow at least one business. Moreover, 72% of users say they have made a purchase based on content they saw on Instagram. Using Insights can help you tap into this market, better promote your brand, and drive sales.
1. Use metrics to inform what and when to post
Insights show which of your posts garner the most engagement. This can help you determine what type of content (video content, product photos, infographics, how-to carousels, etc.) you should post. The activity of your followers can also inform what time of day is best to post for maximum impressions and the highest engagement rate.
2. Follow demographics to explore new markets
You may find through Insights that many of your followers come from a certain city, state, or country. This data can inform strong Instagram marketing strategy in those locations and help you develop a closer relationship with your customer base. Since Insights also allows you to gauge the age and gender of your audience, you can learn which posts are broadly appealing and use that information to expand your target market.
3. Grow your follower base and push sales
Using Insights can help you discover what types of posts lead to new followers, as well as what content leads to website clicks and sales conversions. Insights can help you make the case for adjusting your social media marketing strategy as you gain a better sense of what works and what doesn’t.
Instagram Insights FAQ
Are there any limitations to using Instagram Insights?
Insights is only available through the Instagram app and is not accessible via your computer. Certain Instagram Insights (like the number of times a post gets shared) are geo-locked and only available outside of Europe. Other features, such as the “Total followers” metrics are only available once your page has at least 100 followers.
How often is Instagram Insights updated?
Instagram Insights data is updated every 24 hours. When viewing your Insights, Instagram offers several preset time frames: the past 7, 14, 30, or 90 days.
Can you see how competitors are performing on Instagram through Insights?
No. There are third-party social media tools such as Sprout Social and Supermetrics that can help your business compare and contrast your social media performance against competitors, but Instagram Insights does not offer that service.
Can you see Insights past 90 days on Instagram?
No. Instagram Insights only allows you to view data from your Instagram account over the past 90 days.
Can you export data from Instagram Insights?
No. Instagram does not offer a method for exporting your business’s data from Insights.