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8 Instagram Marketing Tips for Brands in 2018
If you run a business or planning to develop one from scratch, you absolutely need to develop a good marketing strategy.

In 2018, the marketplaces are extremely crowded in every possible niche. However, that doesn’t mean that we can’t get our piece of the pie, right?

Instagram is one of the big pies that can be split into hundreds of thousands of pieces. The only trick is to know how to actually slice it.

The potential is huge.

A recent study reports that 71% of US companies use Instagram for business purposes, while a whopping 80% of Instagram users to actively follow a business profile.

In case you’re looking to start your Instagram journey, I have several guidelines that will help you get started.

Start with the Basics

If you don’t have an Instagram profile, download the Instagram app on your phone and press “Sign Up”.

Once you’ve completed your details, go to “Settings” and click on “Switch to Business Account”.

This feature will help you a great deal the moment you activate it.

Ensure that your Instagram’s username is identical with your other social media networks and with your brand name.

Select a professional picture (ideally the company’s logo) and write a short & concise bio.

Don’t rush with it – try to write it as well as you can, as it will definitely influence your business page’s performance.

Establish Goals

Your Instagram marketing strategy should be smart.

Before heading down the road, you should establish precise short-term goals and long-term objectives.

First off, ask yourself…” What do I want to accomplish with Instagram?”

Depending on your company’s goals, you should identify the following probable motives:
- Improve brand awareness
- Generate sales
- Traffic
- Customer loyalty
- Attracting new customers/clients
- Developing long-term relationships with influencers
Develop an Instagram Content Strategy

Content is king, even on Instagram. When you start an Instagram page, everything is new. You must figure out how you’re going to build a strong audience, and that means you have to figure how you’re going to post your content.
- How frequently are you going to post?
Ideally, keep the rate the same and let your followers know what to expect and when to expect it. You should always respect your promises and maintain consistency.

For example, if you’re posting three posts a day for a few months and your followers have already gotten used to it, you shouldn’t drop the consistency to one post per day.
- What topics will you approach?
There are so many possibilities when it comes to developing an Instagram content marketing plan.

Instagram users generally like visual content, so planning out images and videos would be ideal.

You should even organize your content in different series that you keep updating over time.

For example, if you were covering an SEO tutorial, you can split the content into more parts, therefore creating a series of posts.

Also, you should post different types of content:
- Behind-the-scenes photos/videos/audio – improves brand trust and authenticity.
- Develop comprehensive educational posts – educate before you sell.
- Write inspirational/motivational words – these type of posts are always welcome.
- Repost other brilliant content – it should always reflect your brand’s purpose.
- Encourage user-generated content – here are a few examples of some of the most successful user-generated campaigns on Instagram.
- Videos, GIFs, Infographics – these are probably the most popular types of content in today’s social environment.
- How will you approach your audience?
Your content should have a specific theme. You should decide how you’re going to approach your followers and fans is truly up to you. You can be the funny brand, the confident brand, or the mysterious brand. Choose a theme and stick to it for the long term. The tone of your brand will be remembered, so ensure that your content will always reflect your brand’s culture.

Create a Strong Brand Proposition

Instagram, like all social networks, are simply distribution networks that allow you to develop the image of a strong brand. See your Instagram page as one of the places where you brand can flourish.

David Johnson, CEO and Marketing Specialist at essaygeeks.co.uk, brilliantly exemplifies:

Imagine a supermarket – when you go shopping, there are all sorts of products.

Some products stand out from the others because their brand has managed to win your trust.

How did they manage?

Well, for starters, a strong unique value proposition is the first essential aspect of your brand’s success on social media, especially on Instagram.

Ask yourself -why would any individual follow you instead of your biggest competition?

Identify your business’ unique traits and do your best to emphasize it through the content you post on a consistent basis.

For example, if 10 brands in a niche don’t offer “free shipping”, you should offer free shipping. If your competitors don’t offer any bonuses/discounts, you should be the first to do it.

Your unique value proposition must be very specific and aimed at a very specific audience.

Here are a few examples:

Evernote knows how to capture their prospects’ attention.

First off, they’re specifying their product’s benefits in one sentence (covering everything needed).

Secondly, they’re offering a 30 days free trial – an aspect that is hard to ignore.

Stripe is yet another brand that knows how to carefully leverage their unique value proposition.

Their statement is clear, concise, and complete.

Create a Branded Hashtag

Out of all the popular social channels, Instagram excels at hashtags.

Most Instagram users love to detail their posts with different hashtags.

The reason?

Additional traffic.

The moment you post, let’s say #business, everyone who searches for this tag may come across your post.

What does this mean?

Additional traffic or, better said, free traffic.

Therefore, it would be ideal if you’d learn what type of hashtags work for your unique content and brand.

Lastly, you should create a ‘branded hashtag’, which refers to the creation of a specific, unique, and original hashtag that represents your brand’s culture, mission, or purpose.

And no, that doesn’t mean that your branded hashtag should be exactly the name of your brand.

Create something remarkable and therefore your brand will be remembered.

For example, Coca-Cola’s branded hashtag “#ShareACoke” is a brilliant example that you should analyze for inspiration.

You must have seen the trend – Coke bottles with different names on them, accompanied by the branded hashtag.

A great idea!

#IceBucketChallenge is another successfully branded hashtag that went viral.

The altruistic purpose also helped this campaign become outrageously popular.

Compared to Coca-Cola, this was a campaign created by a non-profit organization that hasn’t spent millions to get the trend going.

Actively Engage with Your Instagram Followers

Engaging with your audience means more than replying to your follower’s comments.

Engaging, in the professional sense, means to reach out to other followers by commenting and liking their posts, expressing your opinion on the matter, and offering advice, especially if those followers have mentioned your brand’s name throughout their content.

You should create interactive contests and different promotions that require your community to do certain actions for you.

For example, you can reward people who care to promote your brand by placing your logo in their cover photos.

Or, you can offer 1-10 big prizes to the lucky winners who have actively interacted with your content for a specified amount of time.

Think out of the box!

There are plenty of ways to improve your customer’s engagement, so don’t forget to do that!

Perform a Competitive Analysis and Get Inspired

You shouldn’t reinvent the wheel.

Instead, you’d better look for brilliant ideas that have already been applied and have been proven to work.

You must have competitors – every business has competitors.

Taking a quick peek and observing what they are doing, how they are posting, what they are posting, and what out-of-the-box tricks they’re using can help you find unique ideas.

“There’s nothing new under the sun” – follow this motto and don’t be afraid to get inspired from others.

The only trick is to know how to add your own twist.

This means taking the same idea and modifying it to make it better.

You can always improve someone else’s work, especially if you’re smart enough to look in more places.

If you find 10 posts on the same topic, you can create a post that exceeds all of them because you have collected all the “good” aspects from each of those posts.

Take advantage of some of the best social media competitive analysis tools and speed up the process!

Leverage Niche Influencers

To speed up the process and improve your Instagram’s page awareness and reputation, you should take advantage of the influencers within your niche.

An influencer is a person/page/brand that has already captured the attention of many individuals.

Generally, influencers earn their money by promoting other small persons/pages/brands to their audiences.

Partnering with the right influencers will help you expand your page and also sell products and services.

Simply put, if a trusted niche influencer recommends a page/product/service, people are likely to trust it more than they would trust a new page/product/brand.

The trickiest part is to connect and negotiate with an influencer whose audience is very similar to yours.

That means that his/her followers should be interested in what your brand has to offer.

In this example, the big “HP” computer corporation uses a respected influencer.

The purpose was to promote a contest that they were holding at that time.

Conclusion

Instagram marketing is incredibly powerful if you know how to leverage it properly.

Use these Instagram marketing tips to embark on this journey and continue learning on your own.

Test, optimize, scale – every remarkable result should be closely examined and later replicated.

Analyzing is key, so ensure you’re collecting all the helpful clues that come along the way.

The post 8 Instagram Marketing Tips for Brands in 2018 appeared first on Unamo Blog.
October 8, 2018
Social Media Monitoring: Improve Your Social Media Strategy with Social Media Monitoring Tools
How to improve your social media strategy with social media monitoring tools?

The evolution and advancement of the internet have come with some very good opportunities for businesses.

Especially in the marketing of products and services.

Businesses now enjoy the internet platform in advertising and marketing all over the world through various platforms available on the internet.

Even though businesses have these opportunities, it is important to understand that one won’t enjoy this opportunity if you don’t have a strategy to move with.

Social media marketing is becoming more popular among researchers and other practitioners.

With built-in data analytics tools, the companies and businesses can track the success, progress and also the engagement of their campaigns.

Strategic Governance and Data Management

However, social media marketing on a strategic level includes governance and management of the marketing campaigns.

So, as said earlier, you cannot enjoy the full advantages of the social media marketing without formulating a strategy.

This strategy should be a summary of each and everything you plan on doing and hope to achieve in the social media.

The strategy serves as your guide to make sure that you know the direction you are moving towards, whether you are succeeding or failing in your marketing efforts.

Having a specific and detailed strategy will be more effective than having a broad, lofty strategy, which will limit your chances to reach your target.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Before we proceed further to the steps to create a social media marketing strategy, lets us first look at the social media monitoring tools like Unamo Social Media Monitoring.

The social media monitoring tools enable one to extract information from various social media sites to determine the popularity of a brand or business.

In other words, this is the best way to caliber the success of the social media marketing strategy.

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How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Create a social media marketing goal that is aligned with the business objective.

Set your objectives clear and precise of what you want to achieve, because if you don’t do that, then you will not have any way to measure your success or failure.

Remember that the goals you set have to be specific, time-bound, relevant, measurable and also attainable.

Track meaningful metrics; you have to know that while vanity metrics like retweets, likes and others can be good, they won’t be helpful for the business.

Instead, you should be focused on lead generation, conversion rate, and web referrals.

Learn as many things as you can about your audience.

Knowing your audience and what they like, what they would like to see will enable you to create content that they end up liking, commenting and even sharing.

This will also increase the conversion rate and will transform your followers into customers of your business or service.

We know this sounds hectic, but if you don’t have time for this, some of the agencies like Traffic Radius can help you go about this process and reach your social media marketing goals.

Next, it is important that while gathering this kind of data does not make assumptions get the real world data, or your marketing strategy won’t be a success.

Here is where social media monitoring will come to your aid.

You can use social media analytics to learn more about your followers, who they are, what language they speak, where they reside and moreover how they interact with your business brand.

This information will guide you to refine your marketing strategies and assure better performance for your set objectives.

Make thorough research of your competition.

Competitor Analysis

With the rapid revolution of the internet, we have today, chances are a large percent of your competitors are already on the internet.

In this case, you have to conduct what we so call competitive analysis.

This will help you know more about your competitors, what they are good at and their weaknesses too which will enable you to continue shaping your strategies for success.

Competitive analysis will also enable you to spot the opportunities of where to put more strength in order to beat your competitors.

For instance, your competitor maybe very good on Facebook but bad on Twitter, then you will know where to focus your efforts.

Always remember to put more energy and focus where the audience is underserved.

Social Media Auditing

Conduct social media auditing; the way you do this if you have already used social media monitoring tools, you should sit back and answer these questions.
- Is everything employed working? If not then what’s working and what’s not
- What kind of audience is connecting with you on social media
- Where across the social media platforms are your target market found
- How does the social media presence of your competitors compare to yours
If you sit back and answer these questions, you will have a good starting point to reshuffle your strategies to make sure they meet your target audience.

You will also know where to allocate your resources and how to beat your competition.

The audit will also enable you to wisely select the platform to market your brand.

Before picking up any platform you know if your audience is in that particular site, and if they are, how are they using the site?

You have to know that before targeting that platform.

You should also find out the imposter accounts, those accounts using your business brand name.

These accounts can be very harmful to your business. Hence, you have to report them as soon as you find them.

Create accounts and if you already have then improved the profiles.

You should understand that every platform has a different kind of strategy to succeed in reaching your goals.

You can decide which platform suits tutorials for your customers and which one is for customer service, based on the kind of business you run and your audience.

Keep in mind that when filling out your profile details, remember to use keywords that your customers will use when searching for your business.

This will make it easier for your customers to reach you, as well as other audience interested in what your business offers.

Do not let the process overwhelm you.

Today, there are many agencies that offer this kind of services and can handle everything about social media marketing.

Get Inspired

Well, in no way this means to copy what others are doing, but you should look for businesses doing well on the social media platforms.

This will inspire you and give you the motivation to champion your strategies and become more like them.

It will also show you the possibilities of achievement one can have if one formulates good marketing strategies on social media and hit the goals set.

You can also visit places like Facebook business success stories to learn how others made it all the way up.

You can design a social media content calendar.

The best way to engage with your customers is by creating quality and relevant content.

This will enable them to read and share their view on your contents.

This engagement is what will benefit your strategies, not only that but by engaging with your customers, you increase the conversion rate.

Note that, you should not only post a leave but also make sure you answer reply to the comments of your followers.

This is what we mean by engagement.

In your posting calendar, you should also plan on what to share and when to share.

This will also include the pictures to post and videos to share.

Not only will that help in planning what to post, but will also help the spacing between multiple posts.

In your calendar, you should also know what is the best time to post your content, the time when your followers are active.

Also, 80% of your content should be based on educating your clients and only 20% should be for promotion.

Try this rule; it’s known as the social media rule of thirds:
- One-third of your social media content should focus on promoting your brand, convert followers and profit generation
- One-third of your social media content should have ideas and success stories from different like-minded people and other businesses
- One-third of your social media content should look for interactive purposes with your audience
You can try this rule and see how things will work out for your business or brand.

But you should keep in mind that do not base your social media content only on promoting your business.

This is because most people will need to know you better before they become your customers.

Test your strategy, evaluate then adjust it to fit your goals.

Do not assume that you will get it right at the first attempt, implement your strategy then keep track of your results.

If you do this, you will find that some plans didn’t work as you anticipated, while others are doing better than you assumed.

Measure Your Success with Social Media Monitoring Tools

Use the social media monitoring tools to see the movement of your social visitors to your website.

You will also find out which kind of posts drive more traffic to your site, which will enable you to understand the kind of posts your audience prefers.

The process of evaluating your strategy is not a one-time thing; rather it’s a routine.

Re-evaluate, then test and do it all again; this one is a continuous process.

Once you do this make use of the gathered information to test different contents, marketing strategies and campaigns.

This will enable you to find out what works and what doesn’t work.

Another way to find out what works in your strategies is to conduct surveys.

Ask your e-mail list, your social media followers, and the website visitors if their queries are being addressed in your social media accounts as you assumed.

Make sure that you use their replies to reform your strategies to suit their needs.

Note that in social media networks things change fast, new networks emerge while others undergo significant demographic changes.

This means that you should frequently go through your strategies and adjust when necessary.

This will also enable you to analyze yourself if you are still on track or out of track.

After looking at the tips on how to create a social media marketing strategy, now lets briefly pass through the social media monitoring tools.

This will enlighten you on creating the social media marketing strategy with social media monitoring tools.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

It’s vital to understand the necessary tools provided by each social media platform to increase the possibility of reaching your potential customers.

Not only that but also to increase the conversion rate of followers to customers.
- Google Alerts – This tool can be used to monitor brand mentioned on the internet.
You will get notified directly to your email and this service will become your ears in hearing what people say about your brand.

The problem is that the tool does not work for all of the social media platforms.
- Twitter Advanced Search – This tool will enable you to know all the tweets that are talking about your brand or business.
But you can also decide to used a social media management company because it saves you a great deal of time and will ensure you get professional service.
- Facebook Search – This is another tool for monitoring your brand or business, specifically on Facebook.
It will enable you to know any mention of your brand on the site.

Although the problem is that it won’t be able to deliver everything especially from private accounts.
- Unamo Social Media Monitoring – This tool allows you to track all social media interactions related to your brand, product, or topic of interest.
By analyzing and drawing conclusions from the data, you can make your marketing strategy more successful.

This tool will help you do more than protect your brand’s reputation and help you to promote your content to the right audience, conduct competitor research, and acquire new clients.

What to Consider Before Leveraging Social Media Monitoring Tools?

Things to consider before employing social media monitoring tools include the following:
- Formulate a plan for your social media monitoring.
Nothing can begin without a specific plan.

You should know why you want to monitor if you don’t then you don’t even have to begin doing it.
- Set goals you want to achieve with social media monitoring.
This should be the main reason you are monitoring, it can be about servicing your customers, it can be about creating a good reputation or awareness, it can also be about creating the social presence of your brand.
- Select a social media monitoring tool that will suit both your needs as well as your budget.
The goal of every business is always to minimize costs and maximize profit.

This differs from business to business based on the level of the business, as well as their target.

But if you are still not sure of which management tool to employ to reach your set objective, then just visit traffic radius to get a proper solution for your social media monitoring tools.
- Start with the free trials before actually paying for the tools.
The social media monitoring tools do differ in the way they function.

This is the reason you should sign up for free trials first to see if the tool meets your needs.

If it does, then you can proceed further, but if it doesn’t then, you can keep trying more and more tools until you find that one which fits your needs.
- Beware of your limits.
Most of the social media tools are not hard to manage at all, although some of them are a bit complicated.

Choose the ones you can easily manage without any trouble, they will all appear to be a little challenging at first, but with time you will get used to them and easily manage them.
- Select your keywords carefully.
For the tools to be efficient, make sure you select your keywords well.

This will enable your social media monitoring tools to be effective at picking up the keywords and giving you the right information for you to work on.

If you fail to do this, then the information gathered would be faulty.

Conclusion

These are a few important tips that you will have to consider before employing social media monitoring tools.

Taking this information and that one above on how to create a social media marketing strategy then you will be able to formulate a great social media marketing strategy with social media monitoring tools.

The post Social Media Monitoring: Improve Your Social Media Strategy with Social Media Monitoring Tools appeared first on Unamo Blog.
September 25, 2018
Instagram Management: The Best Time to Post on Instagram
The Best Time to Post on Instagram:

Believe it or not, posting on social media — more specifically, Instagram — is an art.

There are tons of factors to consider; you can’t just post whatever whenever you want if you’re serious about gathering a significant following.

Some factors are obvious, like posting pictures that are thoughtful, relevant, and spark engagement.

However, just because you’re posting great content doesn’t mean you’re going to be famous anytime soon if you’re not paying attention to what time you’re posting on Instagram.

Time is the most important factor to consider when looking to build a following.

Here, we’re going to break down when the best time to post in Instagram is and some important factors to consider before posting.

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Know Your Audience

Before we get into specifics, we need to discuss the significance of knowing your audience before posting on Instagram.

This means you need to know where they are in the world, when they’re most active, and what they’re most likely to respond to.

It’s cool to post a picture a get a ton of likes from either the large number of followers you have or from the hashtags you use.

But the biggest, most popular pages always feel like they’re totally separated from the real world, posting obviously-sponsored pictures and not responding to their audience.

When you’re paying attention to where your audience is located, posting relevant content, and posting content that encourages engagement, people respond positively by telling others to follow your page.

The Best Time to Post on Instagram

We’ve briefly mentioned how planning posts for your time zone is key to posting successfully on Instagram, but let’s dive a little deeper.

There’s a lot we haven’t mentioned yet!

Post During Off-work Hours

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The goal here is to post whenever people are available to look at your page.

Most people work, which means most people are unavailable for at least seven hours out of the day.

What you don’t want to do is post quality content during hours that people are in meetings or in the middle of projects and tasks.
- Post between 11 am and 1 pm to target people on their lunch breaks.
- Posting between 8 pm and 9 pm is also ideal because that’s when people are relaxing on the east coast and everyone on the west coast is just getting out of work.
Save Important Posts for Weekdays

People function most efficiently with routines.

During the week, we’re waking up early, eating breakfast, going to work, coming home, watching our favorite shows, going on our phones before bed, and then finally going to sleep.

When the weekend comes, people are either relaxing and staying away from their phones or they’re catching up on other tasks because they had no time during the week.

Save your most important posts, like the ones where you are social selling during the weekdays.
- The general consensus regarding when to post on Instagram — and social media in general — is that posting in the middle of the week tends to generate more interactions with followers; however, every business is different and depends entirely on your audience or the audience you wish to target.
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Be Aware of Time Zone Differences

If you’re on the east coast, and your audience is primarily on the west coast, you need to post with the time zones in mind.
- If the west coast is most active at 7 pm, you should schedule your posts for 10 pm EST.
The reason this matter is because it’s incredibly easy for posts to get lost in a sea of similar content.

You want posts to hit the right people at the right time.
- When you time it just right, you can target your primary audience while targeting your time zone simultaneously.
This is key for targeting the largest amount of people as possible.

General Advice for Posting on Instagram

Now that you know when the best time to post on Instagram is, we should quickly go over some general advice regarding when the best time to post is.

It’s easy to look at your most popular posts and try to emulate them every time, but if you don’t understand why they work, you’ll never get the results you’re looking for.

The good thing is that there are tools to make posting on Instagram so much easier.

Let Instagram Insights Do the Work

Sign up for the business account if you’re a business looking to increase your following on Instagram.

It seems obvious, but tons of people don’t do this and aren’t taking advantage of the tools Instagram already provides.

This eliminates most of the guesswork regarding what time-zones to target, what your most popular days are, and what your most popular posts are.
- You can break down interactions by location, time, day of the week, age, and gender.
- You can’t always rely solely on the numbers; some people make fake accounts or separate ones for specific reasons.
But, if you have a ton of followers and there are clear trends present, take advantage of the data you have.

Do Your Own Experiments

If you’re a numbers person and you feel like Instagram Insights aren’t enough, make a spreadsheet and start running your own experiments on the best time to post on Instagram.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution or guaranteed formula for the best results every single time.

The only way to get as strong a feel for your audience as possible is by doing the dirty work yourself.

It’s more time consuming, but it will help.
- Post every single day, and post every hour you wish to target to see what time gives you the best results.
- Log these in your spreadsheet and record the data for at least one week. You can even do follow-ups every month to make sure results are consistent.
Download a Post Scheduling App

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There are a handful of apps on the App Store or Google Play Store that let users rearrange posts and schedule them to go live.

Many of these apps also make it possible to buy followers, but Instagram is cracking down on that, and it’s always obvious when people buy followers.

They’ll typically have less than fifty posts but over 5,000 followers.

That immediately tells people your page isn’t genuine and you won’t receive any valuable data — especially if your account gets banned.
- Look for an app that posts content accurately.
Many will have all kinds of features that seem cool, but none of that matters if no one’s looking at your posts.

The goal is to gain more traction, so having an app that can post a photo exactly at the time you select is more important than how you order them.

The Final Word

Ensuring your content is seen on Instagram is easy provided you’re paying attention to when your followers are active, and when people you follow are posting.

More often than not, you can get a good sense of when to post when you pay attention to when other pages are posting too.

However, what works for them might not work for you.

They might be targeting an audience halfway around the world.

If you’re taking advantage of key analytics, and you see your audience is in the United States, it doesn’t make sense to post at 3 am when everyone here is asleep and everyone in Europe is just waking up.

The most important thing to understand is that there’s no tried and true method for posting on Instagram.

One way of at least getting close to an accurate idea is by generating your own long-term tests using spreadsheets.

If you find that your audience is actually interacting with your content the most at 3 am, but you just so happen to be sleeping at that hour, you can sleep easy knowing a scheduling app can automate posting for you.

You can, and should, figure out when the best time to post on Instagram is by testing for as many factors as possible.

At the end of the day, there are tools at your disposal to make social media management easier, but you have to be aware of them.

There’s no need to guess anymore.

By following these guidelines for posting on Instagram, you’re going to be able to post meaningful content that encourages follower engagement while increasing followers.

There’s no need to buy followers if you’re doing it right, and there’s no reason not to when Instagram even offers its own insights feature.

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Read more: When to post on Facebook and Twitter?

The post Instagram Management: The Best Time to Post on Instagram appeared first on Unamo Blog.
August 30, 2018
Instagram Analytics: Everything You Need to Know to Improve Your Strategy
Instagram Analytics: Everything You Need to Know to Improve Your Strategy

Social media has become a crucial success driver in contemporary business.

With more than 1 billion users, Instagram proved to be one of the most productive social platforms and that’s the reason why over 70% of the US-based businesses use it for marketing purposes.

It’s a great way to present your brand to the global audiences, particularly if you are targeting younger customers.

In such circumstances, it is not the question of whether to use this social network but rather how to do it in the most effective manner.

However, this is where the tricky part begins because most entrepreneurs ask themselves:
- How can I make the most of my Instagram strategy?
- How can I be sure about the results?
- Do I really believe in ROI?
These are very reasonable questions, but the answers depend on Instagram analytics.

According to social media marketers at Essay AussieWritings.com Services, you can never be sure about the final outcome if you don’t monitor Instagram activities and measure results.

But if you do pay attention to analytics, you can determine whether your marketing strategy is successful or not.

We decided to give you a hand and explain how things work on Instagram. In this post, we will present to you the ultimate guide to Instagram analytics.

Let’s begin!

How to Measure Instagram Performance

There are dozens of valuable Instagram metrics that you can follow and analyze.

Of course, an average marketing team is not able to monitor every single indicator because it’s just not feasible or relevant, so they focus on a set of objectives that make the biggest impact on their companies.

For instance, your goal could be to raise awareness of a brand and, in this case, you definitely need to concentrate on post reach.

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On the other side, marketers who want to generate more leads usually focus on user engagement to understand how prospects behave and what kind of action they take.

But we want to make the job easier for you, so we will give you an overview of the basic metrics and the corresponding features.

All of these groups of indicators can be discovered within Instagram Insights, a platform’s native analytics page.

Profile Metrics

Profile metrics consist of 9 different features, including email and call clicks, the total number of posts, website clicks, and profile views.

Besides that, the most important profile metrics are these:
- Follower count: It shows you the overall number of account followers
- Impressions: Reveals the total number of times all of your posts have been seen
- Reach: Instagram reach shows how many unique profiles saw at least one of your posts
- Mentions: Shows you how many times other users mentioned your account on Instagram analytics
- Branded hashtags: The number of Instagram posts with your branded hashtags
Audience Insights

Audience insights are extremely important because you have to learn everything there is to know about the target audience.

It helps you design better content and improve Instagram marketing performance.

Here are the elements of Audience Insights:
- Gender: You can see the number of men and women who follow your account.
- Age: The age distribution of your followers is divided into seven different groups ranging from 13-17, 18-24, 25-34- 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, and 65+ years.
- Top locations: Location targeting is crucial for most businesses and Instagram allows you to see the top five cities and countries where your followers reside.
- Followers Hours: Reveals the average time followers spend browsing Instagram on a daily basis.
- Followers Days: Reveals the days of the week when your followers engage the most.
Instagram Posts (Photos or Videos)

This is where Instagram Insights get a little more specific, revealing metrics such as impressions and saves per post.

Besides that, there are other interesting features:
- Reach: This is the number of unique users who saw a given post.
- Likes: The number of unique accounts that liked a post.
- Comments: It tells you how many people commented on a post.
- Engagement: Counts the number of likes, saves, or comments per post.
- Views: Show how many visitors saw your video post.
Instagram Stories

More than a third of all Instagram accounts are using the Story feature every day, which proves the importance of this social media content.

This is why you have a special section dedicated to this content, counting the number of impressions and the overall reach of each Story separately.

But you can measure a bunch of other stuff as well:
- Exits: Counts the number of users who left your Story.
- Replies: The number of replies to a particular photo or video in your story.
- People insights: It gives you an overview of accounts who have seen a given photo or video within your Story.
Instagram Live Videos

Live video is one of the most popular types of ephemeral content online, so there is obviously a special segment of analytics dedicated to this feature:
- Live viewers at any given time: Shows you the number of accounts watching your live video and reveals their identities.
- Viewers: The number of accounts that saw any part of your Instagram live video.
Now that you’ve got acquainted with the variety of Instagram metrics, you should learn another important trick.

Our advice is to compare these features over time to see how your strategy evolves.

You can easily measure account growth, average reach, engagement rate, etc.

Click to start your free trial

Best Instagram Analytics Tools

You are now aware of things to measure, but you also need to find the right analytics tool.

There are literally dozens of options available on the Internet, but we will show you four tools that can give you the most valuable insights.

Let’s check them out below:
- Instagram Insights
We already talked about Instagram Insights, but this is your starting point and you need to figure it out completely.

First of all, you need to set up a Business Profile in order to access Instagram Insights.

To do that, go to your account and select “Switch to Business Profile” from the gear icon menu.

Since Facebook bought Instagram six years ago, you need to connect to the Facebook page you are currently administering to associate ii with your Instagram Business Profile.

Once you’ve done that, you just need to check all business-related information and complete the process upon making changes, if any.

Since we discussed the majority of Instagram Insights metrics above, we will only mention a couple more interesting indicators.

Top Posts is one of the most valuable features as it gives you the chance to see the best-performing photos or videos in any given timeframe within the last two years.

You can do the same thing for stories and followers.

Besides that, there is the Promotions section that reveals the performance of paid advertising.

It’s a great tool because it explains how your campaigns function, thus reducing the amount of marketing waste in the long-term perspective.
- Iconosquare
If you want a highly professional Instagram analytics tool, you can try Iconosquare.

This software services more than 34 thousand business and helps them make smarter decisions using better insights.

Iconosquare enables companies to understand and improve performance on key social metrics, from audience growth to engagement.

And it’s not only about analytics as the tool allows you to plan and schedule Instagram activities, which makes it easier to grow the number of followers and increase the overall performance.
- Unamo Social Media Monitoring
You can monitor social media channels with social media management software.

This will allow you to track the engagement of users across different social communication channels like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.

With the Social Media Monitoring tool of Unamo, you can monitor your brand, manage your reputation, keep track of your competitors and work on gaining new clients too.

If you want to learn more about Unamo’s Social Media Monitoring tool, you can take a look at the features and sign up for a free trial here.

If you want to learn more about social media monitoring, you should take a look at our article: 6 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website with Social Media Monitoring Tool

How to Enhance Instagram Marketing Using Analytics

This is the last phase of Instagram analytics, but it’s definitely not the least important.

Everything you’ve done so far was only supposed to provide you with actionable suggestions on how to improve the brand’s Instagram promotion.

It all depends on key performance indicators (KPI) and the overall objectives of your campaigns, but there are several aspects of Instagram marketing we consider most relevant on all occasions.
- Firstly, you should pay attention to user behavior and track the results of their engagement.
Their comments, likes, and shares often reveal a strong connection to the brand and you need to discover and approach followers who are likely to become your future customers.
- Secondly, you need to see which posts make the biggest impact on your audience.
Perhaps your followers enjoy “behind the scenes” footages or nature-related photos?

Or maybe they prefer images with appealing captions? Your job is to find it out and create more content that fits these requirements.
- Thirdly, you have to keep the growth in mind.
If your account is not attracting new followers, it’s an alarm for you to change Instagram strategy.

You don’t have to put quantity in front of quality because it’s better to have 100 loyal fans than 1,000 disinterested followers.
- But in general, it’s not good to see your Instagram account standing still and not accumulating new fans.
The most important question is how to do a better job on Instagram.

You can try many different things, but most businesses begin with these moves:
- Create better content
Most marketers don’t want to admit it, but poor and inconsistent content production is the main cause of underperformance on Instagram analytics

In this case, your job is to design a new content creation strategy and give up motives that don’t raise user interest.

Keep in mind that it’s much better to consistently publish high-quality posts once a day than to bombard followers with low-quality content every hour or so.
- Adapting posting time & date
Now that you know when your followers use Instagram, you can exploit it to extend your reach and influence.

Improve you scheduling so as to target days and hours that you know will make the largest impact on most of your followers.

Check out our guide on how to find the best time to post on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram analytics
- Try different CTA options
Do you always stick to the same calls to action (CTA)?

Perhaps it is the reason why your fans fail to respond and engage with your content.

You don’t always have to tease users or post questions.

There are many other solutions: encourage people to tag friends, use active language and a sense of urgency, design bigger CTA buttons or links, and always make it sound easy for a follower to take action.

Click to start your free trial

Conclusion

There is not a single marketing channel out there that can outdo social media performance, no question about it.

As one of the most influential social platforms, Instagram has been growing steadily in the last few years and becoming increasingly important for businesses worldwide.

However, a lot of entrepreneurs still don’t know the real benefits of Instagram marketing mostly because they don’t know how to measure it.

This is why they stop investing in brand promotion on Instagram or waste money due to inefficient tactics.

The only way to prevent it is by learning how this platform really works and how to take advantage of its numerous features.

In this post, we showed you the ultimate guide to Instagram analytics.

Have you ever analyzed your Instagram performance? Which features and metrics did you use? Do you have other interesting suggestions to share with us?

Feel free to let us know about it in comments and we will be glad to discuss it with you!

The post Instagram Analytics: Everything You Need to Know to Improve Your Strategy appeared first on Unamo Blog.
August 23, 2018

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