Brands have found Instagram to be a valuable way to interact with audiences and influencers online, and now the platform is about to get even more useful for professional users. As detailed on the Later blog, Instagram will provide in-depth analytics to professional users, a feature included in its upcoming business profiles.
Social media marketers are no doubt familiar with Facebook Insights, the data-rich analytics that help businesses visualize everything about their online audience, from gender, age, and location to level of engagement with specific posts. Analytics are an invaluable tool for measuring the success of one’s content, but such measurements on Instagram have always been limited to likes and comments.
Instagram’s new analytics will include much of the same information as what’s available today in Facebook Insights, like reach and impressions, which show unique views and total views, respectively. It will also track website clicks any time someone taps a user’s profile URL. This information can be sorted over different timeframes, as well, with users able to see top posts in either a seven-day or 30-day period. This is beneficial to knowing which posts are effective in the short term, versus which may have a longer lifespan.
But the key feature will likely be in the “Follower Activity” section, which reveals when an account’s followers are most active. According to Later, users can view this information in an average of a “typical day,” or look at individual days with activity broken down by hour. These statistics are particularly useful when it comes to scheduling posts for maximum reach, and because the data is drawn from a company’s own account, it will be more effective than relying on industry averages.
Presumably, Instagram’s business profiles and analytics will appeal to non-corporate users, as well, such as photographers, artists, influencers, and anyone else who uses Instagram to find and interact with clients. At this time, however, it’s not clear when the new features will roll out, or how a user will go about converting a standard account into a business profile.
