Use your Instagram Insights to grow! What your Instagram analytics mean: explained.

Let's talk analytics. Trust me, I know it can sound totally boring, and if you're like me you might resist looking at stats because you get into being a creator expressly because numbers were not your thing - but here's the deal: understanding your Instagram insights can be a huge benefit to your and your growth. Even though the conversation about insights and the algorithm often sounds like it's a case of creators versus our robot overlords, the truth is much less scary and a lot more boring. Your Instagram insights are simply a reflection of how your audience is responding to your content. Now, I will say there are some exceptions to this - there are certainly some known cases of Instagram deliberately censoring certain content, however, this is pretty rare, and it definitely isn't happening as often as people who shout "shadowban" would have you think. In 99% of cases, your Insights are a direct reflection of how your audience responded to your content, whether it was engaging and therefore whether the algorithms pushed that content to more of your audience or if it more or less stayed among only your die-hard fans.

Therefore, if you want to grow on Instagram, you need to understand your insights. Knowing what your audience is responding well to versus what they are just not that interested in is essential to crafting a content strategy that is going to contribute to your long-term growth. So, in this post, we're going to go over all the different stats that you can find inside the Insights page within the Instagram app, what they represent, what you're aiming for, and how to change your content strategy depending on the numbers you find.

The first step to understanding your Instagram insights is knowing where to find them. You can find stats for each individual post by navigating to them on your profile and tapping "view insights" but what we're going to start with today is checking out the full insights panel which you'll find a button for on your profile, titled "insights."

Within the insights panel we'll be able to check out detailed stats for each of your posts as well. I know when you first open up this section of the app, it can feel like there are a lot of different numbers and your eyes can start to glaze over - but stick with me. For that reason, I'm going to break down the two main areas of insights that we're going to be interested in: audience and content performance. We're going to spend a lot more time on content performance because what we can learn about our audiences from Instagram insights is relatively limited and also because as always, I want you to focus on creating for the audience you want, not necessarily the audience you already have. As you move forward on this journey, you can use Instagram insights to check in and see if you're moving towards that goal audience - but for the most part, keep your ideal audience in mind and just create for them and don't stress too much about who you currently have, especially if you're a smaller account. Okay, with that being said - let's get into the insights.

How to understand your audience insights on Instagram

When you open up the Insights section of Instagram, you'll see Your Audience as the first header and a "see all" button next to it - when you click on that "see all" you'll get a list of all kinds of demographics about the folks who are currently following you. Before you get too deep into it, make sure you select the time frame you're looking at - by default it will show you 7 days, but I would suggest looking at a bit more of a macro view and selecting 30 days. Now, let's chat about each of the numbers you'll see as you scroll down the page and what they mean for the content you should be creating.

The first stat you'll find is your follower growth rate, or how much your audience has increased since the previous time period - in this case, a month. According to Plann, a popular Instagram scheduling tool, the average growth rate for a brand on Instagram is 6-8% a month. So if you're hitting around that mark with that little green percentage at the top of this page, you're looking good. In my opinion, if you're using Reels regularly, you'll see an even better return (right now, the Creatorly Media instagram is seeing a growth rate of 50% each month) but that's maybe a story for another episode.

Below this stat, you'll see a graph that shows your follows, unfollows, and overall net followers each day. This can be helpful as you'll be able to see any particular days when you've got a spike in new followers, which may be helpful in tracing back to anything contributing to your growth that the insights on your individual posts may not indicate. For example, if you got a shout out from another creator in your niche, or maybe a Reel of yours really started to pop off, or content that you made on another platform like TikTok or YouTube sent a bunch of followers your way - you'll be able to see that reflected in this chart. The main takeaway is this: if you see an influx of new followers on July 2nd - ask yourself, what content did you make or what actions did you take that day - and how you can replicate that to see the same result again. That question is really at the heart of the purpose of analyzing your insights- but we'll get more into the details of that later.

Scrolling further down, we start to get into the basic info about who your audience is in a generic sense. You can see info about where they live, their age, and gender. As I was saying before, I would not suggest you live and die by these stats - it's far more important in my opinion to have a clear understanding of who you want to reach - and make content for them. If your dream is to make content all about New York City, it's fashion, food, and architecture - but all of your followers are from rural Idaho - that doesn't mean you need to switch niches and start making farming content. It just means you need to keep researching new ways to reach that New York audience. Are there creators you can collab with? Are there hashtags you can use, location tags? Stay focused on the North Start that is the audience you're aiming for, and don't get too caught up in who you currently have following you. Switching niches in order to follow your current audience is a really good way to end up unsatisfied and burnt out as a creator (trust me, I'm speaking from experience here)

Finally, at the very bottom of the Audience insights section, we see some stats about when your audience is most active on Instagram. This can be somewhat helpful in guiding your posting times, but really, I'm personally not convinced that posting at specific optimized times is really going to yeild magical results. I think it's much better to be consistent, and post at a time that's going to allow you to be online and interact and reply to comments. So again with this last section, it can be helpful to know, but in my experience posting at certain times over others is not going to make or break your growth on Instagram.

How to understand your content performance insights on Instagram

Now that we've covered understanding your audience insights, let's talk about what I would consider the more interesting and frankly, important, half of Instagram insights: content performance.

The performance of your content can be measured in a number of different ways, which in my opinion break down nicely into two main categories: views and engagement. In plain terms: how many people see your content, and how many people interact with your content. In Instagram's terms, this is called Reach and Impressions and Content Interactions.

First, let's talk about Content Interactions. This is an important place to start because of how the algorithm works. In case you're unfamiliar, here's a really quick crash course on how Instagram determines whether or not your audience sees your content. When you first post, Instagram will show your content to a small test group, it will wait and see if that test group interacts with your post through likes, comments, shares, and saves. If an adequate percentage of this test group interacts, then Instagram will show your posts to more people, test it again, and so on. Therefore, your reach and impressions are in some capactiy determined by your content ineractions. In geneal, my philosophy with content creation is this: rather than trying to spend time gaming the system to get as much reach or views as possible, instead focus on making really good content and the high engagement rate and high reach will naturally stem from that.

Okay, so we know we want to focus on increasing our content interactions - let's talk about what these interactions actually are, and how we can create content that will hopefully, incentivise our audiences to interact. The four main ways your followers can interact or engage with your post are: likes, comments, shares, and saves. Most of us are used to judging the performance of our Instagram posts from likes - that is a mindset that it is time to shift out of, friends. Likes are first of all: not even close to a adequate measurement of your worth as a creator, so stop thinking that. But second, they are not even the most important type of interaction as far as the algorithms are concerned. So let's talk about these different kinds of engagement in order of priority, starting with shares.

Some people will say that saves are the most important metric that the algorithm is looking at, and while that could be true, I'm prioritizing shares here because of their power for organic growth. I know most of y'all listening are working on growing your audienes and while saves definitely tell the algorithm that your content is high quality and worth showing to more people, shares actually immediately show your content to more people either in DMs or on Story posts. So we're going to start with shares.

Shares are highly regarded by the algorithm because they mean that your content was good enough that your followers wanted to show it to other people - that's huge! Let's just take a minute to think about how cool it is that any of our content ever gets shared at all. That's amazing, you created something that was interesting or impactful enough to someone that they wanted to share it with a friend, or even post it on their story. When we're talking about insights, it can be so easy for the power of impacting one person to get lost on us as we focus on ever increasing these numbers so I just wanted to take a second to ackowledge how awesome getting even one share on your content really is. Okay, so we know shares are important - how do you create content that encourages your people to share it?

Here are a few common post formats for you to try out: Tweet graphics, educational carousels, and memes.

Next up, we've got saves. Saves are another great indication to the algorithm that your content is good, and that it should show your content to more people. Saves, in fact, indicate that your content is so good that your followers want to go back and look at it later. How can we create content that is share-worthy? Many of the same types of content that generate shares also generate saves - for example a high-value, educational graphic carousel is something that you followers may want to come back to time and time again. Or, even editorial style photos that they find inspirational. Most of my topped saved content tends to be either informative or inspirational.

Next in our line up of content interactions is comments - these are so important! Firstly, because they provide a venue for you to directly connect with your audience. Secondly, because they indicate to the algorithm that your content was interesting enough that your followers took the time to actually respond to it - again, that's huge! I'm blown away by the time that my audience takes to leave me their thoughts and to share their lives with me in comments. It seriously means the world to me - and I hope it does to your too, when your followers comment. This one is especially big in terms of the "time spent" factor - what I mean by this is, part of Instagram's overall goal as a platform is to keep us engaged for as long as possible - at the end of the day they want us to spend more time on their app then we spend on Twitter or TikTok or YouTube. The more attention Instagram has, the more attention they have to sell to advertisers - and that's what it's all about. If you think about it, comments take people time. I know it might not sound like a lot, but if your content is responsible for keeping someone on the app even 30 seconds longer than they usually would - Instagram will want to take advantage of your superpower content and show it to more people.

So, how can you create content that gets you more comments? I find that I get the most comments when the post is about something conversational - maybe even a bit controversial. Now, I don't mean to encourage anyone to go out there and spout off controversial or offensive stuff for attention and engagement because goodness knows there's enough of that on the internet as it is. But, what I am saying is, when you are bold, and speak your truth - whether it's opening up about your deepest insecurities or even talking about something that most people in your industry are not willing to talk about - that is when you'll really see the most comments. So try starting conversations either through your caption or though the imagery itself - and also make sure you continue to nurture that conversation by replying and interacting with your commenters.

And finally, we've made it to likes: likes are, as I said, probably the least important metric of success in terms of content interactions. They take the least amount of time, people double tap almost on autopilot. It can be a decent first glance indication of how far your posts as gotten, but in general, I would say likes are a watered down version of reach at this point - which we'll get to reach and impressions in just a minute.

Enjoying this post so far? Check out this video:

The Content Interactions numbers you should aim for

By this point, you might be wondering: okay, I know what all of these interactions mean, and how to increase them, but what kind of numbers am I really looking for here? So, we're going to break down a few common stats about each of these metrics. Which, you can find your numbers for this inside the Insights panel, and then when you click into "content you've posted" you can adjust the metric that the posts are organized by: so like, comments, shares, and saves. I'm going to share these stats in percentages, but the Insights panel will give them to you as direct numbers. So it might be helpful for you to calculate these percentages for your current follower count, and use that as a general guide to determine what sort of numbers you'd like to aim for. But, before I tell you the stats, just remember that if you're nowhere near this yet, do not feel bad. The most important thing you can do is simply improve overtime. You might not get to these goal stats tomorrow, but if you can increase any of your numbers by 1 tomorrow, then you've made progress. Okay, with that being said here are the industry standards for content interactions.

From most of the research I did, I found that an engagement rate that is typically considered high quality, would be anything 5% and above. Now, historically, engagement rates on Instagram have been calcualted by adding together likes and comments, and dividing that by the number of followers you have. So if you have 100 followers, then getting 5 total likes and comments would be considered a "good engagement rate" - however, this is actually really variable by audience. Smaller accounts tend to have an engagement rate closer to 30% or 50% - usually because the audience tends to be friends and family who are very engaged in that users life. As your followers increase into the thousands, then 5% becomes closer to the expected engagement rate.

Now, when it comes to shares and saves - there doesn't seem to be very good data out there about what the averages are, so I can only speak from experience. Again, this varies greatly depending on the type and purpose of the post, but I find that in general, I'll get 10 saves for every 1000 likes I get on a post - unless it's a carousel or meme type post in which case it will be closer to 100 saves for every 1000 likes. So, this is a very rough estimate, but you're looking at saves that are in a 1:10 ratio with your likes, or even a bit less - all depeneding on the type of content, because some content is just not focused on saves or shares (like a selfie with a really personal caption for instance). Shares are also going to be hugely variable - and really depend on the style of post, but I would estimate a similar ratio as I did for saves. Now, keep in mind these are all really general estimations, and like I said, the most important thing is just improving from where you started.

How to increase your impressions on Instagram

Now that we've covered content interactions, let's go over impressions. Impressions are essentially the "view count" on your content - this gives you a sense of how many of your followers got to see your post. Inside post insights, you'll actually be able to see a breakdown of where these views came from, including Home (or the main feed of Instagram), from your profile, from the explore page, or from "other" which could include your post being embeded on a website, viewed on the desktop site, or really any other place than your profile, the explore page, or the home page. You'll also see a percentage here letting you know how many people were not following you that saw your content. This can be a really good indication if you're reaching new people, if that's a goal of yours right now.

So what are we aiming for when it comes to impressions? Ultimately, your impressions are a vague measure of how successful your post was at actually reaching your audience. You were able to generate the engagement you needed through content interactions to break through to bigger and bigger test groups - resulting in a larger group seeing your post. As with shares and saves, I wasn't able to find any reputable stats that shared averages of what most Instagram accounts are getting impressions-wise - so I can only share my own experience. On my personal account with 20K followers, in the past year my impressions ranged from 5K views on a post, which was my lowerst, to 17K views on a post - my highest. Most of the time it hung out around the 10K range 0 meaning about 50% of my audience saw the most - that doesn't mean they all interacted by any means, but they at least saw it. So I think that aiming for 40-50% of your total follower count seeing your post is good. And by that I mean, not necessarily your actual followers - some of those impressions may come from people who aren't following you, but in terms of a general number to aim for, maybe about half of your current followers is a good goal.

At the end of day, it's important to remember that these numbers don't really mean all that much. Yes, they help us determine what content works with our audience, and what content will yeild us the result that we're looking for, but if you take anything away from this episode I hope it's that you remember that these numbers do not define you, they don't define your ability as a creative or a marketer, they're just simply a tool we have in our toolbox to create better content for our communities.