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It's time again for my favorite podcast segment. Let's do it together. Today, I'm going to walk you step by step through how you can assess your Instagram analytics to give you more insight on what is working, and what isn't working. So teach your authors go ahead and reheat that cup of coffee, because I'm your host, Cassandra Foster, and we're about to get schooled in socials. Welcome back to school and socials. We've really been diving into ROI this month. And I couldn't let our discussion of ROI go by without also talking data. So today, we're going to explore your IG analytics, specifically the overall health of your Instagram account. But I want you to know that the analytics that you pay attention to month to month and quarter to quarter will truly depend on your business and social media goals. So as we talk about each of the kinds of data that you'll find in your dashboard today, I'll also give some examples of when that type of data might be important to keep an eye on before you about your phone and start staring at those numbers. Let's chat about each group of analytics that you can review on your Instagram dashboard, what they mean and what they measure. So first up is accounts reached. This tells you the unique number of people who saw your content. Then there is accounts engaged. This is the number of unique accounts that have interacted with your content. People who've liked commented shared saved. Finally, the last analytics group you can review right on your Instagram dashboard is total followers. And this just shows you the overall follower count and growth over a specified timeframe. Now within each of these groups are additional metrics that can help you gain insight on what is working well and what is not. As we explore each I will explain them, I promise. Let's get to the fun part. actually taking a look at your data. Get out your device and navigate to your Instagram profile. Then grab a pen and paper, open up a spreadsheet, or navigate to wherever you keep your data for your business, feel free to pause and get yourself ready. Hopefully, you have everything you need to start your analytics journey, you're going to start first by clicking on your professional dashboard. This is going to bring you to an overview page of your professional dashboard. And from there, you're going to want to click See all that is up in the top corner above account insights to get all of those wonderful analytics. Now as soon as you get to your insights overview, I want you to go to that top left corner and change the data range from 30 days to 90 days. And here's why you will more easily be able to see the growth over time, using 90 days as a timeframe versus the last 30 days. And since social media is a long game, think marathon not sprint. looking at data in the last 90 Day chunks can help you better assess what you should do next. Now for my clients, I do report out on monthly stats. So if you want to take a peek each month, feel free. But be wary of changing up your strategy before three months are up. Because if you're not liking your numbers at the 30 day mark, your strategy hasn't had time to take effect on Instagram yet. And you could be throwing it out the window when it could be a completely viable strategy. So please give it three months before you feel like you need to trash it and start over. Which by the way, is usually not the case, it usually just needs a little tweaking. The first group of analytics you will see listed is accounts reached. If you click on that you'll be able to see followers in non followers reached content reach impressions, your top content and profile activity, who that's a lot already. But don't panic, you don't have to keep track of or analyze all of it. Here's what I suggest, you know for yourself. Your overall accounts reached for the last 90 days, the number of followers you reached and the number of non followers you reached. These numbers are important because they can tell you who is seeing your content. So for example, sometimes we really want our followers to be the majority of people seeing our content because we're working on nurturing them building that know and trust factor are so that they can start to buy our resources. Other times, we really want the larger number to be non followers. Because we're working on our brand awareness and community building, we want people to know who we are and how we can help them, and what our TPT shop offers. And so because of that, those three numbers can really give you a pulse on who is seeing your content. And if the right people are seeing your content. In this section, you're also going to see content reach, which breaks down each type of content, you can post on Instagram, and how many people were reached with that type of content. So how many people were reached with your reels, how many people were reached with your static posts, how many people were reached with your stories. So for these, if you're trying to figure out what kind of content is getting you the most reach and with whom, so that you can make more of this type of content, feel free to jot this down too. But it's not necessary for kind of looking at the overall health of your account. You'll also see top posts and impressions, you don't have to dive into these to get a general idea, again, of the health of your account. But you can always explore those if you want to. I'm a total data nerd. So I like digging into it all. But that doesn't mean you have to. And finally, you're going to see profile activity, I would suggest jotting down these numbers, because they can show you how well your content on Instagram is driving traffic to your blog, your store, etc. You can see profile visits, so how many people navigated to your feed. And then you can also see how many people tapped on the link in your bio. So how many people that visited your profile actually had the intention of leaving Instagram. I love looking at these numbers when I'm trying to figure out where the breakdown might be on a customer's journey from the post to the purchase. There's so much pressure this time of the year to buy more stuff from Black Friday sales to Christmas ads. But I don't want you to buy more stuff, I want you to get the right things you need to uplevel your business in this season. So that's why I've opened up my mini Social Media Console scheduled for the next three months. 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Alright, we are in the thick of it and we are going to keep moving forward to help you explore those analytics, click the back arrow and then select accounts engaged. Here you can see where your engaged audience is from, which is pretty cool, but not highly significant statistic unless you're actively trying to launch something. Again, you're going to see your followers and non followers. So this time, it's showing you how many followers and non followers engaged with your content. Again, grab that pencil click over to that spreadsheet and jot these down. Because at different times in our business depending on our goals, we might be looking for more follower engagement. And sometimes we might be looking for more non follower engagement. So having those numbers can be important for you. Then there is content interactions, which is the total number of interactions people took on our posts, including Likes, Comments saved in shares. Jot this number down so you can get a sense of how much engagement is happening on your post. This section also breaks it down by likes comments, saves and share It gives a metric for each. But you don't have to get that nitpicky for your overview, then you will see interactions, what most of us call engagement for all of the content types. Again, super fun to dive into if you want to, but not necessary, really just focusing on the follower engagement, non follower engagement. And that content interaction overview will be helpful for you as you make decisions about what kind of content you're going to create moving forward. And last, but not least, we're going to check in on some follower stats. So click that back button again, and select total followers. Now, this does show you the total number of follows and unfollows. But I don't want you to panic about this data. And that little graph that has that red line for unfollows. Okay, unfollows happen all of the time for all sorts of reason, simply note your total follower count, then after 90 more days, you can compare it. Again, the likelihood that you lost more followers than gained within that 90 days will be very small. So please don't panic about that unfollow number that it gives you there. Beyond that, there is some cool demographic information, such as locations of your followers, age range, etc. Not necessary for getting a pulse on the health of your account. But again, good info to be able to access when you're doing something like launching a course, because you want to know where people are from. You want to know what time zones they're in. So you know when you're going to launch things, and be the most strategic about it. And the last data that you're gonna see here is most active times. And I do want to draw your attention to this one. So in your notebook or in your spreadsheet, write down the most active times for each day of the week. This is valuable information to help you decide when you should post. posting about an hour before your peak active time can help more of your followers see your content. But realistically, if you focus on the few hours before or after your peak time, you should be good. Writing these times down will help when you're scheduling out that content later on, but also when you reassess again in 90 days, so you can easily tell if those times have changed, and you can change your posting times accordingly in any scheduler that you might be working in. So by now, you will have recorded your overall accounts reached, followers reached, non followers reached overall account engaged, followers engaged non followers engaged content interactions, follower count, and most active times. With these nine data points, you can see the overall health of your account, are people seeing your content? Are people engaging with your content? Are people joining your community, most goals you will have for your business and social media will revolve around these three things. So having those numbers down on paper will be gold when it comes to planning down the road. Okay, I threw a lot at you today. So don't be afraid to listen to this episode. Again, pause where you need to take notes. Grab that data. And of course, most importantly, put a task on your calendar for 90 days from now. Or I like the beginning of each quarter, to come back and review and compare your data because numbers and spreadsheets are nice. But if we don't use them to inform our business decisions, then all of our data collection will have been in vain. And you know me, I'm not about wasting anyone's time. So start getting into the habit of reviewing your data every 90 days or so. Trust me, you'll be happy you did. Alright, cool coffee friends. Thanks so much for listening. If you're loving getting schooled in socials, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Also, I would love it if you left a review so that other teacher authors like you can start getting schooled in socials too. All right, I'll see you in the next episode.