How to: Identify Instagram Data for Your Brand

By Maddy Kohnke

Businesses and influencers alike struggle to identify the most successful social media platform, and ultimately how to use it when it comes to growing a brand. While different platforms serve different purposes, one app undeniably reaches a wider audience and allows for an abundance of posting styles. Instagram has been a leader in the social media world since its debut in 2010, and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere soon. With newer features like reels and threads (an app of Instagram) it can be challenging to navigate and in turn capitalize off of the app.

While Instagram may seem straightforward to the casual poster with a personal account, the app suddenly provides a new level of analytics past like and comment count for those with a business account. With insights like demographics (i.e. gender) and showing what time your followers are most active, it has the ability to launch your brand in a new direction. You just need to know where to look for these analytics and how to interpret them.

Creator Tools and Insights

Perhaps the most simple and easily accessible way to track engagement is directly through the app. For business account, in settings there are tabs called “Insights” and “Creator Tools”. These keep a variety of information that is useful for businesses and influencers as they try to enhance their brand and connect with their audience. Insights has the ability to show you an overview of your account engagement through displaying accounts reached, accounts engaged, and total followers. This is a holistic view of your profile, but for more specific analytics you can tap on “Content You Shared” where it will show individual engagement. While this is helpful, “Creator Tools” is likely more beneficial for creators looking to monetize off of their platform, as here you will see categorizes ranging from branded content to frequently asked questions. There are several helpful insights available directly through the app, but at the end of the day information accessible through the app is limited. If you need information past this you may want to consider utilizing Meta Business Suite.

Meta Business Suite

Meta Business Suite is trusted by influencers and businesses across the globe to give them vital information for a variety of Meta platforms (i.e. Facebook and Instagram). While this tool provides an enormous amount of crucial information, it can be difficult to navigate. To start, you need to link you business accounts to the platform where it will then take in all of the data. Then there is a variety of tools including but not limited to: reach, engagement, audience demographics, and ad insights. Although these insights may seem similar to that of the Instagram app, Meta Business Suite provides more depth to the information it provides the user. You can choose the date range when looking at the analytics and it automatically shows the growth rate over the course of the past 90 days. This allows the user to have a better understanding of how their brand is doing as it tracks the insights over time, leading to a more holistic view of the performance of their platforms.

Instagram is a crucial platform when it comes to growing and developing a brand, and understanding the data within the app is equally important, as if you can’t identify what’s working for your business it becomes difficult to optimize the platform. While there are a handful of ways to track KPIs (i.e. engagement, reach, growth) Instagram itself and Meta Business Suite are all encompassing. By understanding how to optimize these tools you will learn how to optimize Instagram for your brand.

Maddy Kohnke’s LinkedIn