How to Measure Your Instagram Account's Engagement

By: Jess Bell

A quick overview of what your Instagram analytics mean.

In today’s world, social media is emerging as a helpful tool for businesses and advertisers to gain exposure for their products. Instagram, an app that many users use to post pictures of different parts of their lives, has become a great platform for personal interests to combine with business. In 2016, Instagram launched numerous tools for businesses, and the opportunity to access insights on an Instagram post. These tools allowed a look into different aspects of a profile, and made it easier to gauge levels of engagement, audience demographics, and which posts were the most successful. 

These new business tools can be broken down into three categories:

1. Accounts Reached
2. Content Interactions
3. Total Followers/Audience Demographic ​

In order to access these tools, a user simply has to go into their settings and change their account from “personal” to “business”. Once an account is a business account, the user can see their “insights” by clicking a button in their bio. Once this is open, a user can see basic information about their page. The percentages tell the user if their insights have increased or decreased compared to the seven days prior.

Accounts Reached 
This section informs the user of views on their account. The first aspect visible on this page is a bar graph that highlights the days in which your account was viewed. In the example, Saturday and Sunday were the two days with the most views. Impressions refer to the amount of times a post or story was viewed during the time period. The percentage given below this data tells the user if it increased or decreased in comparison to the seven days prior. 

Account Activity is more specific, breaking it down into three categories. Profile visits is how many users visited your profile within the time period. Website Taps is how many times the link in a user’s bio (if they have one) was clicked on. Lastly, Email Button Taps refers to the amounts of times the email contact button (located next to insights) was clicked on. ​

Content Interactions
This section gives information about interactions with different posts. Likes refer to the amount of likes the user has received throughout the time period; it doesn’t matter when the post was made, this feature accounts for all likes accumulated. Comments and Saves works the same way as likes for both those features. Story Interactions applies when a story has been posted within that time period. In this instance, there is one reply, meaning another user responded to the post through the “message” feature.

Total Followers/Audience Demographics
Lastly, the Total Followers page. The most prominent features are Age Range and Gender. Age range gives a basic rundown of the ages that follow your profile whereas gender breaks down the percentage of men vs. women. This information is also divided into a seven day range.

Overall, these tools are useful to measure the overall engagement with a user’s profile as well as an interesting way to compare the week before versus the current time period. This can be helpful for businesses to gauge interaction with their profile and, particularly in the audience, what sort of posts they may want to be putting out. ​