Instagram Insights: Why They’re Your Key to Success

There are a lot of things you can do to succeed on Instagram, but there is one main thing you can do to ensure you're not going to lose, and it's something way too many businesses ignore.

That key element: your Insights. Your Instagram Insights are the data that Instagram has prepared, analyzed and arranged in your Instagram backend so that you know exactly who the people and brands are who engage with your content.

If you’d prefer to watch rather than read, look no further:

So how exactly can Instagram Insights contribute to your success? They’ll help you:

Find out who your audience is

Your Instagram Insights will let you know the age groups of your followers and the percentage of which group they belong to, along with the breakup of the gender of your followers. This information should essentially line up with the demographics of your general target audience, but even if it doesn't, that is helpful information to have on hand as it can also help you decide the kinds of content you'll be deploying.

Find out where your audience is

Along with age and gender, your Instagram Insights will let you know the location of your followers, specifically the city and country. If you tap the graph, it will let you know the percentage of your audience that live in that specific city or country. This is helpful information for when you're looking at markets to enter for your products or services, and you can serve ads to the regions as well to double down on your marketing.

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Find out when they're online

Now that you know who your audience is and where they're located, Instagram Insights can let you know when they're online. There's a graph at the bottom of your Insights that details in various shades of blue as to the strongest and weakest times your audience is online. This information is key for knowing when to post to impact the most followers. Of course, this doesn't provide any information on when your non-followers are online, and they'll be finding you via hashtags and your engagement work. Learn more about how to figure out when is the best time to post on Instagram via this video.

Find out which kinds of posts perform the best

Finally, Instagram's Insights lets you know the performance of all your in-feed posts and Stories. You can sort them via all the various metrics, including engagement, saves, comments, reach, impressions, profile visits and a bunch more. This is our favourite feature as it tells you in no uncertain terms the exact types of content your audience enjoys from you, so that you can once again double down on those content types that work, and cut those content types that don't. 

Still feel like Instagram is un-hackable? Give us a shout, we'll help you out.