One of the biggest gripes of brand about Instagram is about to change. To get analytics you had to do it by hand or get a third party service. The first was very time consuming. Trust me I know I have done some manual tabulation of Instagram. The later can be very expensive. It can range from a few hundred dollars to a tens of thousands of dollars a year. This leads many SMB just judge performance by likes. While not the best it’s the easiest to organize.
It has been reported on several sites, including Social Media Today’s site, that the new brand profiles will have analytics built into them. This is great news. I still have reservations about other areas of the conversation. You can see my previous Instagram post here.
Note that I haven’t seen this first hand. All the pictures and information I have seen have been on other sites. This information may change before the service actually is released. However, that said if you have been waiting for an official Instagram analytics. Your day maybe here soon.
The analytics look very similar to what you see in Facebook Insights. It has the basic demographic information, similar to Facebook. One thing you will notice is the top countries you can drill down into cities. It also appears to have when people are on Instagram and what times would be best to post. If you manage your Facebook pages, this is a great bit of information to know. Lastly it will show you, your top posts for the last 30 days. It will be a rolling list. Meaning it will be updated each day and after 30 days posts will drop off. This is done by impressions and not by interaction.
The top posts I think would be done better by an engagement rate rather than impressions. The formula I use for engagement rates are likes, comments and shares (not officially applicable on Instagram) divided by the number of impressions the post received. It tells you more than how many people saw your post.
This is my take on the new analytics. I will keep you posted and give you an overview of the service once it is released.
NOTE: I didn’t include screen shots from other sites. I wasn’t sure where they came from and until we get official images from Instagram, you can see them on other sites.
