Do you know if your Instagram marketing is working? Is all the time and energy that you’re spending following accounts, writing comments, and sharing images really paying off?
Knowing how and what to measure for success on social media networks is one of the biggest concerns that we see for our clients. Most small businesses know that they need to be on social media, but they aren’t sure what sorts of things can measurement their success. Let’s face it, success on social media means much more than only getting a sale, though the end goal of any marketing should be money in the door. Success on social media means competing with the big brands when it comes to brand recognition and building a network of people who trust and will turn to your business when the time is right.
Social media creates an avenue for staying top of mind for your network.
What metrics can and should you be measuring online for Instagram?
Well it depends on your goals … the following KPI’s can help you understand whether or not your strategy is worthwhile online. Track each of the following, or at least the ones that are of interest to you on a spreadsheet for easy reference.
Size of your network.
This is simply how much your network has grown week over week or month over month.
Posting frequency.
This is a measurement of how frequently you are posting. Are you sticking to your goals of posting daily or a couple times per week? Keeping track of how frequently you are posting allows you to be realistic about what your efforts have been.
Your Comments on Other Posts.
This metric allows you to see trends between website traffic or likes and comments on your own posts compared to the number of times that you are commenting on someone else’s posts. This interaction and visibility outside of your direct network can lead to great return.
Your Likes on Other Posts.
Just as with comments, we want to track the number of times that you are liking another profile’s post so that you can see correlations between increased interactions on your own posts and website traffic.
Followers to Following Ratio.
Ideally, you should have more followers than the number of people that you are following. Often times when we are first getting started this will be reverse. You want to track this to make sure that it starts creeping the other way.
Interactions: Number of Likes.
Here I always recommend not only paying attention to the number of likes that you get each day or each week, but also what types of posts these likes are on. Is your network responding to posts on one topic over another?
Interactions: Comments.
Just as with lakes you also want to understand which post are getting the most comments. A great goal is to have an increase in the number of comments but you want to make sure that these are positive comments rather than negative ones.
Mentions and Tags.
Have you ever paid attention to the number of times that other accounts have tagged or mentioned you? Keeping track of this information is a great metric so that you can see more successes and interactions within your network.
Use of Brand Hashtags.
I highly recommend every business use a specific #’s for their brand. This # then gives way to competitions in the future as well as different promotions. Your goal should be to get other Instagram users utilizing your # in their posts.
Website clicks.
Every business Instagram profile should have a link in your bio back to your website. You can swap this link out for a special or promotion and include the call to action in your posts for that time period. Utilizing Google Analytics, you can tell if folks have clicked on the link and were to your website.
New Leads on Your Website.
Through Google Analytics and using goal tracking, you can actually set up a filter to see the number of new leads that came directly from your Instagram profile. This is a great way to combine data from your number of website visits to see which post and types of posts are actually converting to new leads for your business.
What other KPI’s do you measure in your business for your Instagram marketing?