How To Measure Instagram Success.

Success on Instagram looks different for everyone. We all have different goals and reasons why we are invested in Instagram. An important question to ask yourself is: What does Instagram success look like for ME? (Your idea of success may change over time)

Don’t worry about other people’s IG pages and goals- no need to compare. What would YOU like to achieve? Why are you spending time creating content and connecting with your audience? What is the ultimate goal and what are your short-term goals?

Six Instagram Specific Milestones🏆.

Consider the following milestones or markers of success when setting your goals:

1. Follower Milestones: Reaching a certain number of followers, such as 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 followers.

2. Engagement Milestones 📊: Consistently receiving a high number of likes, comments, and shares on posts. Or achieving a certain engagement rate percentage.

3. Content Milestones: Posting a certain number of photos or videos

4. Collaborations: With other content creators or brands (receiving free products and/or getting paid by brands you love)

5. Business and Sales Milestones 💰: Reaching specific sales or revenue goals. Gaining a significant number of leads or getting people signed up for your newsletter

6. Community Growth: Building an engaged and supportive community of followers. Hosting successful live events.

These Instagram milestones can serve as goals to establish a strong presence on the platform and measure their success. Each milestone may represent a step toward greater influence, reach, and impact on Instagram.

Analytics tool 👩‍🏫

Instagram provides its own built-in analytics tool called insights. The availability of certain metrics may depend on your account type: if you have a personal page I would recommend switching over to creator or busines account on Instagram, you’ll have access to more in-depth analytics. You can switch to these account types in your profile setting.

To access insights: Go to your IG profile, Tap the three horizontal lines in the top right corner, Tap “insights”Here you will find detailed metrics for your posts, stories, followers and more.

Instagram’s insights should cover most basic metrics, while third-party tools offer more comprehensive analytics for those who require in-depth data analysis for Instagram strategy. Some popular options include Sprout Social and Hootsuite

Now let’s take a deep dive into a very important measurement of Instagram success; engagement 📈.

You want to focus on Instagram engagement for several reasons:

High engagement indicates that your content resonates with your audience, building a stronger connection between you and your followers. Instagram’s algorithm tends to prioritize content with high engagement, increasing its visibility to a wider audience.

Engaged followers are more likely to take desired actions, such as clicking links, making purchases, or signing up for newsletters, which can impact your goals.

The key engagement metrics on Instagram are likes, comments, shares, saves, impressions and reach.

For individual post metrics simply click on the post and you’ll see the engagement data below the post. But it won’t calculate your engagement rate. Your engagement rate is expressed as a percentage and is used to assess how effectively your content is connecting with your audience.

Engagement Rate Formula

For an individual post:

(total engagement (likes+ comments+ shares)/ total number of followers) x 100

Average Engagement rate over period of time (weekly, monthly, quarterly):

(total engagement for all your posts/total number of posts) x 100

What engagement rate should you be I aiming for? A good/high engagement rate is considered to be in the range of 3-6% This number may sound low but once you start calculating you realize that it's actually pretty hard to reach that number. My advice is to use this as a guideline and don't get down on yourself if you are nowhere close to that range.

The takeaway from this post? You should definitely be focusing on increasing engagement 🙌🏻. I have put together a list of “ 🔟 tips to boost your engagement” Sign up for my newsletter and you'll get it delivered in your inbox 📧 .

I applaud you for investing time in your online presence and I wish you all the best with your online endeavors.