These 3 Things Will Help You Grow On Instagram🪴

When it comes to Instagram growth tips, usually you’ll come across a laundry list of things you should be doing - engage more often, post twice a day, use certain hashtags - it goes on and on. But in today’s episode, I wanted to dive into the deeper strategies behind growth, that aren’t necessarily directly about creating - but instead about analyzing. We’re going to talk about the 3 main factors you need to be paying attention to in your Instagram Insights if you want to grow.

What are Instagram Insights (and why is it important)?

Before doing anything, it’s important to understand Instagram Insights and how they can help you! Instagram Insights are the analytical data that helps you learn more about overall trends across your followers and your content’s performance with your audience. This data can be helpful when trying to find out what types of posts work best for your business.

I also will say that if you are using Later (which is my scheduling platform of choice) and truly want to dig deep into your Instagram Insights, I would use their Analytics tab - as it is a very digestible way to read your data.

Profile Growth

If you are using Later, I like to start in the Profile Growth and Discovery section, this provides an overall picture of how your Instagram is performing. You can find all of this same data by going into your insights directly on the Instagram app.

Understanding the growth (or decline) of your follower count can lead to some very interesting insights. If I am seeing steady growth or even better, a spike in growth - we need to pay attention to when this occurred and why it happened. This is one of the reasons I love using the Later analytics tool because it makes it so easy to see these spikes.

Using the Creatorly Instagram as a case study, our growth rate in January of 2022 was 24.3%, which is actually pretty impressive. That equals 768 followers in just one month. My question is, why? How did these folks find us and what helped convince 768 people to stick around? This is when you would start digging into your Impressions and Reach. During this period of time - did we see a spike in either of these areas during the month of January, the answer is YES.

On January 3rd, we saw a huge spike in both Impressions and Reach. We hit 40,778 impressions and 32,878 reach on that day. What did we post that caused this influx? It doesn’t look like this was caused by anything we posted that day, but most likely caused by something we posted in the previous weeks. After doing some digging, we did have a Meme posted a week or two before that and it seems like it could have been the culprit. Though it was posted the day before Christmas Eve, it didn’t start to get traction until January 3rd. In total, this one post received 82,356 impressions/reach and received 13,133 views. Though Instagram isn’t known as an evergreen platform - some posts have a longer shelf life than others - and that’s what happened here. This post was relatable. There is a funny meme video of someone walking and collapsing after what looks like a long day of work - the headline reads “Me, after a long day of content creating...”. This topic seems to hit home for a lot of folks, so it performed really well and played a role in our growth in January. This tells me that we should continue making fun, relatable content - because this is something both our current audience enjoys - but also potential followers as well.

Profile Interactions

Something else you should pay attention to while doing your research is Profile Interactions. Again, this can be found on the overview section in your Later analytics or you can go to your main insights tab directly on the Instagram app. Profile interactions include profile visits and website clicks. This is important to review because this shows you what content is resonating with your current audience and potential followers enough that it encouraged them to visit your profile and even click your link in bio.

Let’s keep using the Creatorly Instagram account as an example, still using the month of January. During the month of January, we received 3,970 profile views and 425 clicks. The highest amount of profile views we received was on January 12th, receiving 202 profile views. It looks like on that day we made two posts, one was a TikTok Reshare about organic ways to increase engagement and the other was a relatable another relatable meme about developing a strategy for new clients - they both performed pretty well, which might be one of the reasons we received some profile views on this day. Of course, the views could have also been generated from previous posts as well.

Next, is website clicks. The largest spike we had in website clicks was on January 14th with 40 clicks. This makes a lot of sense to me because on this day we posted a Reel that I created about how we create Instagram content for our clients on a monthly basis and provided a call to action with urgency because that was the last week that we could take on clients for February. This tells me that people really like learning more about what we actually do as an agency and have some interest in our services. This also tells me as a business, we should make sure to mention our services more often and include more calls to action in our posts.

Post-Performance

Another important thing to look at in your insights is post-performance, which to me just means your engagement. Again, shout out to Later - I promise this isn’t sponsored by them - but I love how well their Post Performance section is laid out. It enables you to look at all posts in a certain time period and even sort by engagement. The only downside is that it doesn’t show your Reel performance, so you will have to look at that using Instagram.

The top 3 performing posts for January include a carousel graphic about the new Instagram Subscription Feature, a tweet reshare about repurposing content, and a “spicy” meme using a photo of the Spice Girls. This shows me that we should continue posting fresh, updates about new Instagram features - maybe even new features on other social media platforms or even tools - like Later, Notion, etc. This also further confirms what we learned earlier, which is that folks are drawn to the fun, relatable memes - so we should definitely keep that up as well.

—

Learning how to read your analytics, paired with patience and consistency, is the key to growing on Instagram. The performance of your posts tells you EXACTLY what your audience wants and as long as you are delivering that consistently and in a digestible way - you should be on the right track. If you are struggling and want some guidance, I recommend checking out our Instagram Audit service. It is only $89 and my team will provide you with an expert opinion on your Instagram strategy. It includes a detailed report card outlining my analysis of your profile, including where you’re winning, and where you can improve. It breaks down every aspect of a successful Instagram, including images, captions, hashtags, your bio, highlights, stories, and more. We can’t wait to check out your Instagram and help you reach your goals for 2022.