Behind the Scenes of Instagram: How to Analyze Your Brand’s Performance
Have you ever paused while mindlessly scrolling through Instagram and really thought about how mind-blowingly massive the platform has become? We’re talking over 1 billion monthly active users sharing a staggering 100 million photos and videos per day.And at the heart of this endless firehose of visual content lies something incredibly potent for businesses and brands – a goldmine of Instagram brand analysis insights waiting to be unearthed through the power of Instagram analytics.
We’re not just talking about vanity metrics like follower counts and likes, either. With the right strategy, Instagram brand analysis gives you an unprecedented peek behind the curtain to understand your audience’s authentic attitudes, behaviors, and feelings toward your company and products.
Intrigued? You should be! Let’s dive into what Instagram brand analysis is all about and how you can start leveraging it to supercharge your marketing game.
What is Instagram Brand Analysis?
At its core, Instagram brand analysis is the process of pulling back the curtain and pinpointing the wealth of customer experience and brand perception insights lurking within Instagram data.
Maybe you paused at the words “data” and “analysis” and started feeling a little intimidated if numbers aren’t your thing. Don’t worry! Instagram brand analysis isn’t just for data scientists and analysts. It relies on intuitive dashboards and visualizations to turn cold data points into easily digestible, actionable brand intel.
Some of the key things you can expect to uncover through Instagram brand analysis include:
– How your followers are growing over time and which content spurs new fans
– What hashtags, locations, and types of posts drive the most engagement for your brand
– Where your Instagram audience demographics and interests are concentrated
– How people are talking about and perceiving your brand based on comments and sentiment analysis
– How your brand’s performance on Instagram compares to competitors
The ability to truly understand these different facets of your Instagram presence is invaluable in today’s visually-obsessed world. It allows you to stop shooting completely blind with your Instagram initiatives and start making data-driven optimizations.
Why Does Instagram Brand Analysis Matter?
I can already hear some of you skeptics muttering, “But Instagram is just a trivial app for posting selfies and food pics, right?” Wrong!
Instagram matters for your brand regardless of whether you’re a multi-billion dollar company or a small local business. Here’s why:
Instagram Is the New Window Shopping
80% of Instagram users follow at least one business on the platform. More and more customers are developing brand preferences and even buying directly through Instagram. Your presence is crucial.
Visuals Are Hugely Persuasive
We’re wired to perceive the world visually. Almost 70% of people say images and videos have inspired them to purchase products. Instagram is unmatched in its ability to showcase your visual branding.
Your Competitors Are There
No matter how behind the curve you think your brand is, your competitors are likely already active on Instagram. Ignoring provides them a wide-open advantage.
Influencers Hold Court
Almost half of Instagram users rely on influencers to help guide their purchasing preferences. Instagram’s influencer marketing universe is unparalleled for brands.
Youth Culture Is Captive
Gen Z and Millennials live on Instagram. Over 70% use it at least once per month. If you want to cultivate future brand loyalty, you must connect there.
As you can see, Instagram has rapidly evolved far beyond just another peripheral social media channel. For brands, it’s the modern-day mall where customers window shop and decide what to buy or who to engage with.
Does your brand have an authentic presence where your fans want to discover you? Do you understand how your visual content resonates? Or are you stuck twirling store sign on the sidewalk? These are the kinds of critical questions Instagram brand analysis helps to illuminate.
How to Conduct an Instagram Brand Audit
The good news is that you don’t have to be a data scientist or programmer to take advantage of powerful Instagram brand monitoring and analytics tools these days. Modern software with intuitive interfaces allows just about anyone to dive in and uncover valuable insights to optimize their strategies.
Here’s a step-by-step overview of how you’d conduct a comprehensive audit of your brand’s Instagram presence and performance:
1. Connect Your Instagram Account
The first step is connecting your brand’s business Instagram account to whatever analytics tool you’ve chosen to work with. This secure integration allows the monitoring engine to start pulling in all your historical and real-time data.
2. Benchmark Your Profile
With access to your data, your tool will automatically start calculating your current Instagram performance across key metrics like follower growth, engagement rates, hashtag performance, audience demographics, and more. This snapshot establishes your current benchmarks to track future progress.
3. Evaluate Content and Hashtag Performance
One of the biggest benefits of Instagram brand analytics is the ability to see exactly which specific types of posts, hashtags, filters, and visual content resonate best with your audience based on engagement signals. You can dig into the attributes of your top performing Instagram content.
4. Monitor Comments and Mentions
Most Instagram analytics tools extend beyond just posts you publish to monitor anytime your account @handle is mentioned in comments or tagged content from followers. This 360-degree view is critical for understanding your brand’s reputation and word-of-mouth marketing.
5. Analyze Audience Insights
Who exactly makes up the audience you’ve cultivated on Instagram? In-depth Instagram analytics tools reveal incredibly detailed demographic data about your followers’ interests, location data, frequently used hashtags and more. This fuels better targeting.
6. Discover Influencers and Top Fans
Instagram brand monitoring also surfaces your biggest advocates and influencers naturally creating engagement around your brand. These evangelists are primed for potential partnership opportunities to amplify your campaigns.
7. Compare to Competitors
To gauge where you truly stand, any good Instagram analytics tool will also allow you to directly track and compare your performance head-to-head against key competitors. Benchmark engagement, hashtag usage, content topics and more.
8. Track Performance Over Time
One of the biggest advantages versus evaluating surface-level metrics is the ability for Instagram analytics tools to illustrate your performance trends week-over-week, month-over-month or however you choose to visualize growth.
9. Identify Content Opportunities
Using all of the data about your top-performing posts and content types, as well as engagement trends and audience interests, these tools can automatically surface untapped content themes and opportunities for you to pursue.
10. Report on Success
Finally, whether it’s for internal stakeholders, executives or clients, Instagram brand monitoring solutions make it easy to instantly package up your analytical findings and insights into visual reports and dashboards to convey impact.
Best Practices to Get Started
As you can see, Instagram brand analytics goes far beyond just looking at surface-level engagement numbers. When leveraged correctly, you get powerful visibility into your brand identity, audience, and competitive positioning.
However, none of these insights matter unless you actually implement and act on them. Here are some quick best practices to ensure your Instagram brand analytics efforts immediately translate into impact:
Set Clear Goals and KPIs
Before even diving into any data, establish your top Instagram brand priorities. Are you hyper-focused on community growth? Engagement and word-of-mouth? E-commerce? Define the metrics that map to those objectives so you can optimize around them.
Benchmark Competitors Early and Often
Likewise, identify your closest competitors and commit to continuously monitoring how you stack up against them when it comes to audience size, engagement, content strategy, and more. Use this data to inform your brand differentiation.
Establish Performance Thresholds
To avoid analysis paralysis, set clear thresholds for what qualifies as successful engagement rates or growth trends on Instagram based on your industry benchmarks. Automate alerts when you exceed or fall behind those targets.
Empower Employee Advocacy
Use your Instagram analytics tools to pinpoint your most zealous brand advocates and top fans creating engagement around your products. Enable your employees to repost, amplify and activate those brand evangelists.
Collaborate With Influencers
Similarly, analytics uncover the influencers and creators who have already cultivated relevant and engaged audiences aligned with your brand’s space on Instagram. Pursue strategic partnerships to collaborate and co-create sponsored content initiatives.
Activate Content Insights
Lean on the data about your top-performing hashtags, content themes, visuals, and engagement trends to continually inform your brand’s Instagram editorial calendar and posting strategy moving forward.
A/B Test Everything
Even with all of those content insights, don’t be afraid to continually test, iterate and experiment with your Instagram posts and campaigns. Embrace a mindset of constant optimization to see what new creative concepts resonate.
Track Brand Lift
Lastly, look beyond just your Instagram channel itself. Establish processes to track how lifts in Instagram metrics eventually translate into broader brand awareness, sentiment, and conversions in your other marketing areas.
The Future of Iconic Visual Branding Awaits
For modern brand builders, Instagram has rapidly become one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal for crafting iconic visual identities