← Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
121. Instagram Analytics Made Simple: How to Read Your Data & Grow Faster
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Hey, quick reminder. With tax season coming up, Collective keeps your business tax ready all year long. From tracking deductions to quarterly estimates and tax filings. So you don't have to stress right now you can get 50% off your first two months at collective.comchc that's collective.comchc. Tax season is right around the corner and if you're already dreading it, you're not alone. I used to get so stressed around this time of year, but Collective has made it so much easier and way less overwhelming. Collective keeps your business tax ready all year long. From capturing every deduction and keeping your books clean to quarterly tax estimates and professionally prepared tax filings. They handle the back office so you don't have to. It's truly an all in one financial solution that turns tax season from a panic into peace. And right now, Collective is giving my listeners 50% off your first two months. When you go to collective.com CHC that's 50% off your first two months at collective.comCHC Again, collective.comCHC See hey friend, welcome back to Call Her Creator. Powered by your all in One Creator Store. Stan Stan is the easiest way for.
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You to make money online.
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All of your courses, digital products and.
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Bookings are hosted within your link in Bio. If you're ready to start your free trial, visit my show notes and click my affiliate link to get started today.
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All right guys, so for a successful social media marketing strategy, keeping tabs on your analytics is key to growth and continued success. The professional dashboard inside of Instagram, it can be super tricky to understand and maneuver. So today I want to take the time to really dive into those Instagram analytics and help you understand what each of them mean and why are they important to your overall strategy. So during today's episode, I'm going to summarize each metric, I'm going to explain the difference between each one of them and then I'm going to give you some actionable tips while I'm teaching you what they all mean so that you can go do it as soon as you're done listening to this episode. If you are listening today, I hope that you will leave me a five star review. Let me know how you're liking this podcast. Send me a DM over on Instagram. Let me know what kind of episode you guys want to hear in the future. And you know, I just want y' all to know that this is a two way street and I'm here for you guys. So let me know what y' all want to hear and we'll get them on the books for the next episode. Before we get started, I really just want to shout out one of my listeners. I went and checked out my reviews this week and I've been really sick. So it was nice to see some really positive feedback from you guys. But one of them popped out at me and I want to try to spotlight you guys on a weekly episode. So if you leave a review, this could be you next episode. But Katy Perry, 24, says, I took three pages of notes from just the first episode and I can't wait to learn more. This means so much to me. Thank you so much for the review. I just. All I want to do with this podcast is give you guys value and educate. So these reviews from you mean the world to me. Thank you so much. So let's dive into today's episode of Instagram analytics and how you can use it to make your Instagram strategy way better. Make more money, honey. So Instagram metrics are measurements of performance that let you in on how your Instagram content is actually performing. Instagram. Is your audience responding to it? We're going to go into specific analytics later on, but some of the metrics that you should be measuring include impressions, reach, and follower growth. And before we get into all of that, I just, I want y' all to know why this is so important. So there's three reasons why I think it's super important for you to understand your Instagram analytics. The first one is Instagram metrics let you know what kind of content your audience prefers. When you're posting different types of content, you need to check out your post metrics to see which types of content are getting the most attention. So, you know, imagine you're posting carousels, static images, reels, and you think they're all just really great, but you see that your audience is favoring a different, one specific format. You want to lean into that. For example, myself, I get way more engagement when I post a reel versus when I post a carousel. And that carousel can be way better than the real, like, more education, more value as far as the content goes. But people still are liking my reels better than my carousel. So I try to lean in harder to reels because that's what my audience wants and that's what gets more engagement. And what do I say when it comes to engagement? I say the algorithm will serve your content to more people when you have better engagement. So listen to your audience. They're giving you metrics. Go pay attention to them. Go understand them so that you can lean in harder to that. The next reason why Instagram analytics are so important is because these metrics keep you on track with your strategy. Whether you have, you know, personal goals for yourself, or maybe you're a social media manager and your company has these goals that they want you to reach, these metrics are going to help you stay in line with that. So think about if your goal is to increase your follower count, you're going to want to make sure you're actually increasing your follower account. Same with story views. Are you actually increasing those story views like your goal says? So you need to be able to check these metrics to make sure that you're hitting your goals. And then the third reason why Instagram analytics are so important is because you can measure specific campaign success. So say you're running this major campaign that involves paid ads and you're spending money. If you're not checking those analytics, you're going to just be dripping through your money because you're not. You're not going to understand if it's actually working. Do you need to change some things? Should the creative be switched out? So that's why it's very important to check on your stats. So now that we understand why they are so important, let's talk about how do you even access them? So first, you need to understand that you need to have a business account or a creator account to access analytics for your Instagram. If you have a personal profile, you don't get to see how stuff performs. So go ahead and switch that over. You know, there was a myth going around that when you switch your account from personal to professional, that your reach drips, dips dramatically. Not true. I've got 164,000 followers over on my business account. I have like 1500 followers on my personal. So that bust your myth right there. To view your account insights, you're going to head over to your account and then you can go to the Insights action button. And then you'll see a little dropdown hamburger menu up at the top, upper right. What you're going to do is click that and then you'll get an overview of all of your metrics. And once you're in there, you know, there's a bunch of different metrics. There's content you shared, there's stats about your followers, there's stats about your engagement. So we're going to dive into all of that. There's eight important metrics that I look at when it comes to Instagram analytics. So the first one is going to be impressions. Not to be fooled with reach, because a lot of people get these two mixed up. Impressions is different from reach. So impressions tell you how many times your content has been seen. Your impressions let you know how many times that individual piece of content has been viewed. This is different from reach. And let me tell you how it's different. Impressions are always going to be higher than your reach, okay? Because one person can have multiple impressions on one piece of content. So let's say that Sally saw your reel three times. This is one person. Sally saw your reel three times. So your reach is going to be one. It reached one person. Your impressions would be three, because she viewed it three times. Get where I'm going with this. So that's why they're very different. Impressions are a really good measurement, though, for you to track, because that means that a certain piece of content is doing well. People came back to it, or the algorithm served it to them again. Now, it's important to understand that impressions on ad campaigns need to be weighed differently than impressions on an organic post. And here's why. If you're running an ad and that ad has a million impressions, you might run into ad fatigue, which means that the person that you are targeting, the people you are targeting have seen your ad over and over and over and over and over again, and they're just getting sick of it. And what that can lead to is them unfollowing you, you know, them marking that ad that they don't want to see it anymore. It can be bad for business. So always pay attention to your impressions. When it comes to paid ads, you know, you want to keep a happy medium there. I personally will check my ad campaigns, like, every week just to see how the numbers are going. And if I see my impressions, like, way higher than my reach, then I'm going to know that people are seeing my ad way too many times. And I'm going to probably pause it and I'm going to redo some things. I'm going to edit them out, revamp. I'm going to change out the picture, change out the format of what kind of ad it is. Maybe it's a real. I'm going to change it to a carousel, or maybe I'll just edit the caption. But you need to make sure that you do something that tweaks it a little bit so that people don't get sick of the same ad every single time. The next Instagram metric that you need to pay attention to is your reach, which, again, this one is very Similar to impressions. But reach is going to be how many people actually saw your content. So this can be them seeing it on the Explore tab, the home feed tagged post. You need to understand that these are unique views. So. So if a hundred accounts saw your post, your reach is going to be a hundred. Regardless of how many times they saw it, your reach is a hundred. That's why impressions are always higher than reach. Now I've got some pro tips for you to increase your reach. So here's five tips to increase your reach right now. One is posting at the right time. Make sure you're posting your content when your followers are online. And there's a couple ways to make sure that they're online. You. One can check your analytics. Or two, and if you really understand who your target audience is, you're going to know when they're probably on their phone. If they work a 9 to 5, they're probably not on their phone during the day. They're probably there in the evening. The next one is prioritize reels. Reels are still being favored by the algorithm. They help you reach more people. I personally get more engagement when I post reels versus other formats of content. So make sure that you are prioritizing reels in your strategy. The next one is use the right hashtags. Hashtags are still very powerful over on Instagram. Regardless of what anyone else says, I still wholeheartedly believe in them. You can actually track your hashtag if it's actually working on your Instagram post. If you go to an individual post and view the insight there, it'll actually tell you if people came in and saw your content because they were searching that hashtag. So that's really valuable piece of information for you to have. And then collabing with other accounts is a very easy way to increase your reach. All you have to do is collab with like a reel or a carousel. And then what that does is that gets you in front of their audience and your audience. So of course your reach is going to be higher. And then sharing to stories. If you post a piece of content and you want to rev up the reach just a little bit, you can actually promote it over to your stories. That's still going to count as reach. If people see it, there's. I don't really think that you should share every single post to your story because people might think it's repetitive seeing it in their feed and then in their stories. But if you can kind of warm them up before you post it to stories that's going to be better for you. So here's a little behind the scenes strategy when it comes to increasing your story views and helping your posts get more reach. First, you're going to want to warm them up in the first story slide with like a question using the poll sticker. Make it just an easy question that they can answer and make sure it's relevant to the post that you're about to promote. So ask them a quick question and then the next slide ties in your post, whether that's your reel or your carousel or whatever it is, but you warm them up first and then you show them what the real content is and that that will help your story views still stay high and not dip.
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Tax season is right around the corner and if you're already dreading it, you're not alone. I used to get so stressed around this time of year, but Collective has made it so much easier and way less overwhelming. Collective keeps your business tax ready all year long. From capturing every deduction and keeping your books clean to quarterly tax estimates and professionally prepared tax filings. They handle the back office so you don't have to. It's just truly an all in one financial solution that turns tax season from a panic into peace. And right now, Collective is giving my listeners 50% off your first two months. When you go to collective.com CHC that's 50% off your first two months at collective.comCHC Again, collective.comCHC.
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The next Instagram measurement that is super important for you to understand is your engagement rate. Higher engagement means you're probably going to grow faster because the algorithm is going to keep sharing your content to more and more people. So engagement with your content relative to your follower account, that is what engagement rate actually is. So while it might be tempting for you guys to compare your engagement rate to these bigger brands like Nike and Kim Kardashian, that's not something I ever want you to do. You have to understand that these global brands are obviously going to have really good engagement rates because everyone knows who they are. For someone like me or Miss Sally over here, people don't know us, you know that well, we're not going to get millions of likes off of every single post. It just just doesn't happen. So make sure you have, you know, realistic goals in mind when it comes to your engagement rate. And make sure if you're a social media manager too, make sure you're delivering that to your business or brand as well, letting them know, like realistic expectations when it comes to engagement rate. So the way that Instagram like formulates your engagement rate is it's your total engagements divided by your follower count times 100 and that gives you your engagement rate. So reporting on this metric over time will give you a sense of overall performance trends. So if you keep seeing like a steady increase in your engagement, that means that you're posting content that resonates with your audience. You're doing a good job, Keep it up. The next metric that is super important is obviously your follower growth. Now I do want y' all to know this is a vanity metric, but I personally have seen the more followers I get, the more I sell more digital downloads or coaching calls or get more clients. So it just, it is what it is. Follower growth is it's either steadily inclining or it's declining. I wouldn't say like putting a number like, oh, we're going to get 10,000 followers this month, that's just not realistic. And I'll tell you something, when I get a lead for social media management, if their first question is how many followers are you going to get me in the first month? That's a red flag to me because nobody can tell you how many followers you're going to get unless they're buying your followers. And that is not a good thing to do by the way. So don't be following buying your followers. But what I can promise them is that they are going to see a steady increase in their reach impressions, their followers, because we're going to be putting out valuable content consistently and spreading that brand awareness. So be realistic here guys. When evaluating a growing or shrinking Instagram follower account, context is super important. Especially if you're experiencing like a random spike in drop offs due to something like a one time promotion or a paid ad. That's probably why you're seeing a dip in followers. If you're seeing a big spike in followers, it's probably because something went viral. So, you know, keep that context in mind when you are looking at this information and make sure to measure your follower count over time. Ideally, you're seeing sustained gradual growth over time, which indicates that people are liking what they see from your content and they want to make sure they see more of it. Obviously, you know, understanding what is or isn't working is also essential when it comes to your Instagram marketing strategy. You want to make sure you know the types of content to continue creating and what needs tweaking. Though your total follower account may seem like a vanity metric, again, I do think it's a vanity metric. It ultimately represents the potential reach of your content, whether you like it or not. So more followers means you're probably going to reach more people. Now, I know a lot of you are probably like, all right, Caitlin, give me some quick tips on how to improve my follower account. And I wish that I could tell y' all the secret sauce to improving your followers, but I can't. But what I can tell you is you can up set, set yourself up for follower growth success if you do a couple of these things. So one is posting reels. Again, they're being prioritized by the algorithm. So you have a potential to reach more people. And if they resonate with your content, hopefully you turn them into followers. Um, the next one is, you know, collaborating with other accounts, maybe doing an Instagram live. The cool thing with Instagram Lives is that when you go live, it, it alerts your followers that so and so is going live. And so if you go live with another person that maybe has a bigger account than you, it's going to also tell those followers over there so and so is going live. So you get yourself in front of more people. So that's a really good strategy to keep in mind, too. If you were to do, like, consistent lives, maybe every Thursday you go live with a new account. That's going to get you in front of more eyes, too. Um, collaborating with a reel or a carousel obviously is going to introduce you to new followers as well. You have the potential for them to follow you if they like your content. And then another piece of that is engagement. I think engagement is super important for your follower growth. Make sure you're spending time in the app, commenting on people's content, replying to stories, maybe heading over to bigger accounts in your industry and just starting a conversation there and building a community there. That's only gonna help your. Your engagement and your follower growth. Another important metric that I like to watch personally is my hashtags. Now, I like to use Flick for this because they do all of the heavy lifting for me. But you can still go to an individual post on your profile and click View Insights for that post. And Instagram will tell you if people found your post from hashtags. So that's a pretty cool insight to do. So to view that, you'll just go to your profile, tap a post that you want to look at, and click View Insights. And then once you do that, you'll be able to scroll down and see all the insights from that post. You'll be able to see if you got new followers from that post, what the engagement was like, the reach, the impressions, all the above. Another analytic I want to look at is Instagram stories. Analytics. Those are still very important too. I always tell people, say sell on stories. That's where you've got these warm leads. People that are already following you, that already probably trust you, they kind of know who you are. So Instagram stories are the best place for you to really sell. Chances are you already probably look at your Instagram story insights in real time. Like when you post it, you'll scroll up just to see who's looked at it, how many people have seen it. But there is a way for you to look back on this stuff even after 24 hours. So to view insights on your stories, you're going to go to your story by tapping your profile picture on the top of your feed or your profile, and then you'll just kind of swipe up and you'll be able to see those individual insights right there. Now, if you want to view one that's passed, you'll just go back to your profile and find your archived post and switch it over to stories, and then you'll be able to see like your best performing stories. You can also just go to your professional dashboard where all of your analytics are, and you'll be able to see your story on analytics in there as well. So here are some of my favorite metrics to track as far as stories go. So one of them is story replies. Story replies are the number of times somebody Instagram DM'd you from your stories. And getting these replies from stories means that you're nailing your content because people are actually engaging them. Now, if you're lacking story replies, you might want to consider being more direct with responses to your post, like maybe asking them, hey, swipe up and let me know what you think about this, or hey, send me a DM and let me know what you think about this. Like asking them your call to action, asking them to engage with you is probably going to help your story replies. Story exits are also a really big metric to look at. What that means is that it's going to show you the number of times that people swipe to stop viewing your story, maybe because they were bored or they don't want to hear from you. These are very important. If people are exiting your story, you're not posting good content, or maybe you're posting too much content. So keep that in mind. You know, while story exits don't necessarily mean that your story was bad, they can signal one of these three things. So one, your series of stories was too long. If you're posting more than like 10 story slides a day, you're getting a little too much there. Your content was repetitive or redundant. That's going to make someone click off as well. And then maybe your audience just wasn't interested in that story that you had that day. So keep those three things in mind when you are looking at your story exits. Now. Pro tip if you want to increase your story views again, I think I talked about this at the beginning of the episode. You want to use engagement stickers. So when you scroll down or when you go to post a story, if you swipe down, you'll be able to see all these different stickers and there's like the poll sticker, the question sticker, quiz sticker. Those are my top three that I like to use to get more engagement on my stories. I'll use the poll sticker and kind of act ask like a very easy to answer question. I'll use the questions box to do kind of like a ask me anything. Now when you do ask me anything, if you've got a big following already and you don't want to have too many stories up to where people are exiting, make sure you pick and choose what stories you reply to on stories. And then you can also just reply to people in their DMs if it's like a one off question that you don't think anybody else would be wondering about. And then the quiz sticker. I like to use the quiz sticker to kind of gauge what my audience wants from me. Even though it makes you put in a right answer, like you could honestly, all of them could be a right answer. And you can still swipe up and see which answer was clicked so you'll still be able to understand, you know, what content resonated best. Okay, so now that I've kind of went through the analytics with you guys, let's talk about how you can improve them. Now. One of the biggest metrics that I like to improve on a weekly basis is my reach. Because the more people that you reach, the more potential you have to get in front of a potential customer. So there are a couple different ways that I improve my reach. These are all tips that you guys can use to help improve your content, reach your impressions too, and hopefully get more followers with these, with these tips. So the first tip I have for you for increasing your reach is going to obviously be creating engaging content. This includes content that you created yourself or content that's been posted on Instagram before. But what you need to do here is keep it engaging, get people to comment. You know, calls to action don't always have to be salesy. They could be something like double tap if you agree or send this to someone in the DMs. But getting them to engage is going to help you. So always have your audience in mind when it comes to posting your content. Now, super engaging content is typically, typically shareable content. So that can be like funny memes or content that makes you relatable to other people in your industry or maybe just relatable to your audience, your followers, your potential customers. So when you think engaging content, think call to action. Shareable, relatable. Hopefully that helps you guys. The next way to increase your reach is collaborations. And that can be through posts, that can be through reels, that can be through Instagram Live. So I want to give you guys some examples here. Now, when you do a collab post, you don't always just have to partner with someone else in your industry. Think about people that supplement your industry. So let's say you are a realtor. If you want to go live with someone, but you don't want to go live with another realtor, then go live with a mortgage broker or a home inspector or home insurance person and give continue to give your audience value with stuff that supplements what you do. Same goes for like, maybe you're like a mental health coach, maybe you do a live with a yoga teacher, maybe you do a live with another psychiatrist. You know, that's different from a mental health coach, but they're actually like a certified, They've got a PhD. Think about if you're a baker, you could do a live with someone in the event space. So, so you see how you see where I'm going with this. I'm picking people that supplement what you do. They're not exactly competitors, but they help you with what you do. So that's super helpful when it comes to collabing. The next one you can do is using keywords in your content. Please make sure that they are relevant to what you are posting. Please do not keyword stuff. I don't know if y' all have seen it all over Instagram, but people were telling you to like write all these keywords on your, on your reel and then shrink it down and hide it. Don't do that. What I've read is that meta can actually see when you do that using their AI and they'll see that as keyword stuffing and they will not favor your reel so just be authentic and genuine with your keywords. You know, make sure you're adding keywords into your title or your hook of your reel. Make sure you're adding those keywords into the caption, but don't just stuff them on the reel for no reason. That's so dumb. The next one is use your favorites feature where you can do close friends. Now, a lot of people don't take advantage of this. I don't take advantage of this myself. I use it on my personal profile, but not my business profile. But think about if you made a close friends list of like your VIP clients and you share discount codes or new offers with just that close friends list. That's a really good one. You could also do, you could also segment your close friends list based on different products. So maybe like for, for the month of March, you're just going to focus on people that have bought this one specific product or service. So then when you share stories, it's just going to be talking to them. That, that close segment of people. You see where I'm going with that? Like you're, you're putting content just for them and what that does too, it's like a psychological thing on their end because when they see that you've added them to that green circle, they feel special. They feel like a vip. So, so that's a really good way to connect with your audience, build a deeper relationship and hopefully they'll refer you to friends that way. The next way that you can increase your reach is obviously to monitor your analytics. And I told you guys, at least on a monthly basis, you should be looking at your numbers. Um, if you really want to get jiggy with it, start checking your analytics on a weekly basis and deep dive into specific post. Go look over on your Instagram dashboard on your professional analytics. Look up what got the highest reach for that month, like the top three post, then repost those for the next month. Maybe you change out one thing about that post or maybe you just directly save it and repost it again with a different title. I don't care how you repost it, but repost it. Repurpose content when you can because your audience has already said, hey, I really like this content. So there's no reason for you to keep recreating the wheel every single time. Take what's working and redo it again. Another important status that you can check on to make sure that the algorithm is not hiding your content is to check your account status. So what you can do here, if you see that you're not eligible to be recommended under your account status. That means that something's going on with your profile. Maybe you went against community guidelines, but you can fix that as long as you know where to look. What you can do is you. You can go into your settings and find account status and just make sure there's no derogatory remarks on your account. There are. Fix whatever's going on. And once you're green again, Instagram will start sharing your profile again. This is a common misconception too, is that people think if they get one hit that they're never going to be shown again. And that's simply not true. As long as your account's in good standing, they're going to continue to show you to more and more people once you figure out what went wrong. Lastly, post original content. Don't screen record someone's content and repost it. Don't steal people's reels, don't steal people's carousels and graphics. Be your own person. Be original. People want original thought. You know, people hire you for you, not for what you do, but they hire you because they like who you are as a person. Maybe you're funny, maybe you're just genuinely. You care about people. People understand that and know that, and that's why they buy from you.
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So be yourself.
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Engagement is still possible. And your account is not dead. You just have to put in a little work. Imagine what 28 days of guided actions.
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Could do for you. Okay? Could blow up your engagement. So let's just wrap this up.
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Engagement doesn't die forever. It just needs a little reset. And the truth is, you don't need to reinvent your business or burn out trying to post more. You just need a simple step by step plan. That's exactly what the Instagram Engagement Reset Challenge gives.
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You.
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Each day for 28 days, you'll get one action to take. It's doable, it's consistent, and it's proven so that by the end, you'll not only see engagement rise, but you're gonna feel connected to your audience again. And that's what actually drives sales and clients is that connection. If you're listening to this and nodding along, this is your sign. Don't just listen. Join us inside the challenge today. I'll leave the link in the show notes, or you can head to my Instagram and send me a dm. I'll send over the challenge to you that way too. But the easiest way is going to go to the show notes that you're listening to right now, I cannot wait.
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To see the results you get.
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Like, once you start that first week, I want you to screenshot me your results.
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Let's talk about it.
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I can probably help you supercharge them.
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A little bit more. But all you have to do is.
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Decide to start, and let's decide that today, because the more engagement you get, the more you're going to move that needle in your business, and you're going to use Instagram as a business and not a hobby. All right, thank you guys so much for listening today. I will see you next week.