Navigating Instagram's Insights

The Instagram feature that allows you to switch from a personal profile to a business profile may have existed for a while now, but it's becoming increasingly more popular. For those of you who are unfamiliar, a business profile allows users to access the analytics of their content, amongst a handful of other tools. This feature can be incredibly useful, especially for influencers using the application, but only if you know how to navigate it and what to do with the data that it provides.

Unfortunately, there's no way to play around with the business feature without changing your settings. Furthermore, it's only really beneficial if you keep this feature on long-term. So, once you have changed your settings, you'll have to give the app about a week, maybe two before it can provide you with proper insights from your content (Note: people often use fake titles, such as "Movie Character," when switching their accounts. There's nothing wrong with doing so, but just remember that choosing your title is part of the brand that you are building).

Anything that you post after switching your accounts will provide you with analytics of that individual post. To access this, go to your desired post → click "View Insights" → scroll up on the white section that just appeared at the bottom of your screen. Your entire screen should now provide your analytics. You can play around with this as you please, but for now, shift your focus to "Reach," toward the bottom of the page. Take the reached number of people → then take the number of likes at the top of the page → calculate the percentage of people who liked the post out of the total number of people who saw the post. Your reach number is perhaps the most valuable of an individual post's analytics because it puts an emphasis on engagement, rather than quantity of likes.

Once you go back to your profile page → click the bar at the top (it should read, "X number of profile visits in the last 7 days"). This will take you to your more general insights. Make a note of your highest days and times of interaction, but be sure to dig a little deeper. If you had a significantly higher number of interactions on Monday than you did on Tuesday, but you posted on Monday and you did not post on Tuesday, it is illogical to conclude that your followers are not as interactive on Tuesday. A more helpful set of insights for user interaction can be found by clicking "Audience" on the far right of your screen → then scrolling all the way to bottom to "Followers" → then clicking the light grey "Days" to the right of that. Here, you will actually be able to see if there's a consistent difference in engagement on certain days.

The issue here is that a lot of people are receiving these insights, but they're not sure which is most important to focus on, especially when some are more difficult to access than others. Furthermore, this feature is only beneficial if you know how to interpret Instagram's analytics and what to do with them. There are plenty of other tools that come with the business feature on Instagram, so I encourage you to further explore! That being said, try to focus on the specific insights that I have noted to best figure out what is simply working and what is not.