If you are an Instagram user and if you treat your Instagram presence seriously, most probably you’d like to know if you’re successful in what you do and how your audience reacts to the content you publish. That’s why your Instagram data is worth its weight in gold.
However, as you probably know, Instagram itself isn’t making it easy for us to track our performance.
Instagram Insights – a free tool to check your Instagram data
I guess you know Instagram Insights quite well, and most probably you are also aware of the fact that the data presented there is quite limited. The biggest obstacle is, though, not the type of data but the time frame for which you can analyze your data – it is only the last 90 days.
How can one analyze their performance over a longer time period? How can you know if you are actually improving? If you are engaging your audience less or more than in the past months? Unless you manually write down data regularly once a month, you simply won’t know.
There is now also an option to see your Instagram data from Facebook’s Creator Studio. There are some pros and cons of using this free solution. Firstly, just like Instagram Insights, it is free. It enables you also to access your data from a desktop device, which may be important for some users. However, for now, in Creator Studio you can analyze data only for the last 7 days. Not enough, right?
Where can I find my historical Instagram data?
Even though native Instagram solutions can help only to some extent, there are other tools that can provide you with your historical Instagram data for much longer time periods. What we are talking here about are obviously external social media analytical apps.
One such tool is Sotrender and here’s how it works there.
Once you connect your profile to Sotrender you’ll automatically get 30 days of historical Instagram data.* From this point on, you can already analyze your performance for the last month. Good enough for a start, right?
*The only exception is data about the increase in the number of followers and followers’ demographics – this is because of the Instagram API limitation, which does not return such data.
From the moment you connect your profile to the Sotrender app, we will be collecting your data regularly. That means you can analyze all your data from the moment you started using Sotrender.
For example, if you connected your Instagram profile on January 1st, you can analyze your data and performance from the beginning of the year in the middle of August.
What kind of data can you analyze then? Well, among many:
- Number of followers, but also how many followers did you gain or lose on a specific day (you can use this metric, for example, to assess if your recent campaign was a success or not)
Number of followers, Sotrender
Growth rate, Sotrender
- Reach – this metric informs you how many users saw your content in a selected time period. You can also analyze impressions, which helps you understand how many times your content was viewed (in general, the number of impressions will be always bigger than reach).
Reach, Sotrender
- Profile views and profile clicks
Profile views and profile clicks in Sotrender
- User activities, presented by days, days of the week and post types
To build an engaged and loyal fan base, we should be encouraging users to interact with our content in a meaningful way. Analyzing how users are interacting with our content now is crucial to understand if the level of engagement is satisfying for us. Usually, we should be aiming at getting more comments, shares or saves, than just likes.
User activities, Sotrender
- Content performance – top stories and top posts in the selected time period (which you can sort according to your needs, e.g. by the number of likes, saves, comments or impressions)
How can I use all this data to improve my Instagram performance?
If you’re not that experienced marketer or Instagram content creator yet, you may wonder what is the benefit of having such Instagram data at hand and how you can use it.
- You know your audience’s interests. By analyzing your best-performing content, you know what your audience likes to see on your profile, and it’s a clear sign of what type of content you should produce more often.
- You know your audience’s online habits. If you know when your audience is using Instagram and when they are interacting with your content, you can better plan when to publish posts and stories to get higher engagement.
- You know if your strategy is right. By monitoring your performance in a longer time frame, you’ll see, for example, if the number of your Instagram followers is growing or not, and if the content is generally engaging people or not. These variables will tell you if you’re targeting the right audience with the right content.
Also, if you’d like to become an Instagram influencer (we actually have a guide that may help you become one), brands that would like to cooperate with you will be asking you to share Instagram data about your performance. That’s why it’s important to have such data for longer time periods, to prove that you’re consistent and that your numbers (like engagement or followers) are growing and that cooperating with you has potential. Also, keep in mind that Instagram may soon hide the number of likes our posts get, so brands will have less public data available to analyze your performance.
