Using analysis of Instagram stories to enhance your content
With Instagram cementing its position as one of the world’s most influential social media platforms, use of the app continues to grow exponentially with each passing year. As the platform grows, so do the benefits of utilising it for business purposes. Instagram is quickly becoming one of the most popular platforms for artists to expand their following, and as a result of its growing use by businesses, Instagram now allows business accounts to track their analytics. An aspect of this revolves around the stories function, allowing users to see who is viewing their stories in much more detail. Out of Instagram’s 800 million users, 300 million use the stories function daily, making up a huge proportion of the platform’s users. Due to the popularity of the function, it is vital to take a closer look at your analytics.
Overall Reach
Instagram’s analytics allow you to view the reach and impressions generated by each individual story clip. The reach is the number of people who actually watch your story, impressions signifies the number of times your story has been viewed. For example, if one person watched your story three times, your analytics would show that one person was reached and your story achieved three impressions. For this reason, your impressions should always be higher than your reach. The higher your follower count, the higher your reach should be, so don’t be disheartened by a low reach when you are just getting started. As your account grows in size, your reach will grow with it. However, the percentage of reach will go down as your followers increase. For example, people with millions of followers will have a lower reach percentage when compared with somebody who has a thousand followers.
Examining rises and falls in engagement
Analysing increases and decreases in engagement is a highly valuable tool when evaluating your social media strategy. If your reach is increasing, take the time to analyse exactly why this is happening, you may be posting more often, or you may have increased the quality of your posts. Replicating this strategy in the future will be hugely beneficial for your engagement rate. If your reach is decreasing, it is vital to look into the reasons, make sure you are posting enough and encouraging user engagement. The only method to improve your performance on social networks is to analyse what is working and what isn’t. As well as following advice, there is a high amount of trial and error involved, so it is important to keep checking your engagement level and adapting your strategy accordingly.
Increasing your reach
One method proven to increase the reach of your stories is using geolocation or hashtag stickers. Using these stickers, your story may be featured in the story for a location or a specific hashtag. If your story does get featured on location story or a hashtag, you will receive a message in your notifications from Instagram letting you know. Make sure to keep track of which hashtags and locations provoke the biggest surge in reach, this will enable you to decide which ones to reuse in the future in order to generate further engagement on future posts.
User behaviour when viewing stories
Instagram analytics for stories have taken detail to the next level by allowing you to actually see user behaviour in response to your stories. You are able to view when users exit your story, and if they decide to tap back to rewatch a clip or tap forward to skip a clip. These statistics are highly valuable, as they enable you to see which individual clips provoked a positive reaction, and which were not of interest to your viewers. Receiving a high number of taps back usually signals that your stories are a hit with your following, and should keep using the same methods to continue positive engagement. If you receive a high volume of tap forwards or exits you should take a step back and evaluate why you are losing the interest of your viewers. In order to improve your content, you must be able to learn from your mistakes.
Clicks on stickers
As previously mentioned, you can add stickers to your stories featuring hashtags and locations in order to generate a higher reach. Using analytics, you can also track how many times people clicked on a particular sticker. By tracking this data, you can see which locations and hashtags provoked the biggest response, giving you an insight into which stickers you should reuse. In short, adding stickers to your story is a great way to increase engagement and further track user activity.
Instagram is undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools to utilize as an artist. With unlimited potential, the platform is an ideal site to showcase your music and your brand and to build a following. The stories feature adds another dimension to this, allowing your following to engage with you further. Keeping you active on a daily basis, the stories feature is one of the easiest ways to increase engagement. Due to this, it is imperative that you keep a watchful eye on your analytics, and use the data to hone your strategy and expand your reach even further. Your Instagram story analytics can tell you a great deal about the quality of your content and the reaction that each clip provokes, enabling you to consistently improve your posts. The sooner that you begin to analyze the response to your content, the sooner you will be able to adapt accordingly and will see improvement in your reach as a result.
