As of 2017 Instagram has become the most powerful online platform with an average of 49% of American adults using it daily according to a business.com article. With 15 million registered businesses, the world of marketing has had a complete facelift since the app’s introduction and it can be hard for smaller businesses to compete at the same pace as companies with massive advertisement budgets. But with the right tools, you can hone in on your target audience and grow your network organically. Here are three of the tools you can use to better understand your Instagram audience:
1. UNUM
UNUM is an app with both a free and paid version, developed as a tool to better control the branding of your account.
The free version provides a grid layout of your current posts, and includes blank squares to drop and arrange new images for future posts to get an understanding of what your layout will look like. It also provides analytics which show things like top posts over various time periods (top 10 this week, month, year), your most successful times of the day to post, and a summary of your most successful hashtags. For example, my most successful post times have been at 7pm on Tuesday, 12am on Wednesday, and 3pm on Saturday.
The paid version of UNUM allows users to combine these two features in the app and schedule posts out from their arranged grid at the optimum time periods.
2. Instagram Analiytics
Instagram Analytics are another useful tool that come provided by Instagram when you convert your Instagram to a business account.
Post Insights will show you information like how many times the post was saved, the number of times the post has been seen (referred to as “impressions”), and the total amount of times the post was seen by unique accounts outside of your own followers, or “reach.” It’s useful to compare the analytics of individual posts and see what your followers best respond to. Instagram Analytics also provides Page Insights, which provide the same information above except over the course of weeks. It also dives in further to show valuable information like % of male followers vs % of female followers, age range brackets and the percentage of each, top locations by city and country, and the hours that your followers are most active.
For example, maybe your followers are 70% male, 60% between the ages of 18-24, and predominantly live in New York City with Orlando as a close second. And since they mostly live in New York City, their most active hours on Instagram are around lunch time and subway rush hour EST.
3. Followers
Followers is another free app that lets you be nosey and see who unfollowed you, because aren’t we all just a little curious? Some pages use mass-following as a method to gain followers, and then immediately unfollow accounts to declutter their feed, and it’s nice to know who genuinely is interested in your page and who just wants a follow-back.
