Instagram Insights Are To Optimization As Morally Gray Is To Romantasy

 

If you’ve ever found yourself scrolling through your Instagram insights, feeling like you need to be a data analyst to understand them, you are not alone. 

 

Most people building a platform on Instagram experience some level of confusion with insights. I get it, there is an overwhelming amount of data, and it can be hard to know where to start. (Unless you do happen to be a data analyst.) 

 

Well, take a deep breath, my friends, because I’m here to help demystify the world of Instagram insights. 

 

I’ll share with you what I’ve learned directly from Instagram and how it has translated to my own experience, giving you a peek behind the curtain and actionable steps to help you optimize your content.

 

Let’s start by talking about why you should love Instagram insights as much as you love that morally gray character in your favorite romatacy novel. 

 

With over two billion (yeah, I said two billion) users, Instagram is the perfect place to find your market and grow your bookstagram or authorgram platform. 

 

But like any journey, quest, or mission (insert favorite plotline here), you will need a map, a reliable compass, and a guide. 

 

You can think of me as your trusty guide as I explain how to use Instagram insights as your roadmap to a successful platform. 

 

Insights and Reach and Engagement … Oh My! 

 

With Instagram insights, you can gather valuable feedback about trends across your followers and how your content performs with your audience. 

 

This tool lets you get a general overview or dive deep into metrics for specific posts, stories, reels, and live videos to see how your audience engages with each one.

 

The key is knowing how to interpret all this amazing data and leveraging it to create high-performing content that will get you to the next milestone on your hero’s journey. 

 

As you discover what’s working, you can use my free content creation guide for ideas to help you keep your content fresh and effective. 

 

Top 8 Instagram Insights You Should Know About (And How to Interpret Them to Increase Your Content Performance):

 

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there is a lot of data to sift through, and it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees when you aren’t sure of the most important numbers to look at. 

 

These are the top eight insights I use for my own business and Instagram account, and I’m confident they’ll come in handy for you too.

 

Follows Per Post

 

This is an important metric because it allows you to see what content goes beyond drawing eyes and actually converts viewers into new followers. 

 

The goal is to find the high-converting content buried in your feed, reels, lives, and stories so you can study it and produce similar content in the future. Essentially, we are looking for your content overachievers. 

 

This metric is all about ratios. For example, I had one post that got 60k likes and gained 300 new followers and another that got 8k likes and gained 1k followers. I consider the second post to be more successful because the conversion ratio is vastly better than the first post, even with just a fraction of the likes.

 

In the high-performing content showdown, conversion wins. 

 

Website Clicks And Profile Views

 

This data is a great way to determine whether your CTAs (Call to Action) work. Whenever you ask someone to do something in one of your posts (i.e. Add me on Goodreads, sign up for my newsletter, visit my website…), you can see if they actually took action.

 

Knowing this information allows you to gain valuable insight into your content. Was it intriguing enough for people to want more? Was your CTA clear and to the point? Is your content adding value to your followers? Are the reels marketing your book, resulting in sales?

 

Non-Follower Reach

 

While I believe that connecting with and serving your existing community should be one of your main priorities, it is also important to get your content in front of non-followers. That’s how our communities grow, after all.

 

Knowing your non-follower reach lets you know what type of content you should focus on as you form a strategy for reaching new people. Two of my favorite strategies for getting higher non-follower reach are making highly sharable content and collaborating with other accounts.

 

Shares 

 

Speaking of sharable content … (Like the foreshadowing there?) I know this is a broad and slightly vague term and that it can feel tricky to achieve, so if you want to dig deeper, I talk more about this in my Expand Masterclass. 

 

This metric is so important because shares are essentially free ads for your account. When people share and save your content, it shows the algorithm that people find value in your posts and will start pushing it out to more people. 

 

One of the most exciting examples of this that I can think of comes from one of my indie romance author clients. When we started working together, her big goal was to reach more of the right audience for her content and, ultimately, her book. 

 

Her reels at the time averaged 5-75 shares and 3k-5k views. A big part of her strategy was to create reels that were more sharable so her content would be more visible to her target audience.

 

After one month of working together, her reels averaged 100-1k shares and 8k to 20k views, with several reaching up to 40k and 1 million views! 

 

This spike in her share and view rates allowed more of the right people to see her content, which directly translated into more book sales. If that doesn’t convince you of the power of shareable content, I don’t know what will! 

 

If you are looking for a great way to get more reach and higher engagement, take a close look at your content with the highest share and save rates. What do those posts have in common? How can you create more highly sharable content for future posts? 

 

Reel Watch Time

 

As most of us know, the algorithm has a habit of changing the game on us, but as of late, watch time is one of the most important indicators for reel success. If your reel is being watched from start to finish, the algorithm will push it to more people. 

 

The key here is to test the effectiveness of your hook. If your reel is 10 seconds, your first goal is to keep people watching after the first two seconds. 

 

If you’ve done that, but they drop off at six seconds, you may consider adding a second hook, and so on, to keep them watching until the end. And if you can get them to watch it more than once, all the better! 

 

Ask yourself (and your insights) what hooks are working for your audience.

 

Story Replies

 

Stories are an amazing tool for connecting with your community and engaging your followers. Keeping an eye on this metric allows you to see what types of stories are starting conversations and building relationships within your community. 

 

Take a moment to study what kind of stories your community is connecting with. Then use that knowledge to build a strategy for more engaging stories in the future. I also recommend checking out my free bookstagram engagement boosters guide, which includes plug and play story prompts that help you foster connection with your audience.

 

While I have found these eight insights to be the most useful for my Instagram platform and business, there are plenty more you can use to analyze the effectiveness of your content. The beauty in this is your ability to look at them all, create strategies using different data, and test out what is most effective for you.

 

Content Optimization (Give The People What They Want)

 

Once you’ve gathered all that lovely data, you have the makings of a beautiful map. (Picture the map in your favorite fantasy novel.) Now it’s time for content optimization. You do this by analyzing, strategizing, and becoming a student of your content so you can start meeting (and exceeding) your Instagram goals.

 

A Few Questions To Ask Yourself When Combing Through Your Insight Data:

 

• What time did you post?
• What was your CTA?
• What was the topic?
• What was your hook?
• How long was the content (reel seconds)? 
• What value was shared?
• What content pillar did it fall under?

 

As you study, you will be able to use your findings and start experimenting in order to refine and optimize your content. This applies to new accounts as well as established ones. Even just two weeks’ worth of content can give you enough useful data to work with.

 

So What Does This Look Like In Real Life?

 

I can think of a great example from my own account. I had a reel a while back that ended up being a top performer, so a few months later, I recreated the reel, keeping the same text but using a different video. It performed well again, showing me that the text and the hook were effective. 

 

Later, I did two other experiments with the same video footage but with a different hook. This allowed me to compare the effectiveness of each hook and learn what people were connecting with.

 

The key is to experiment and have fun! Use the data and that beautiful creative brain of yours to discover what your community connects with and make more of that. 

Speaking of connection, I would love to connect with you over email or on Instagram, so feel free to slide into my DMs any time!