If you are using Instagram for your business, you already know how this platform can benefit you. To keep your Instagram game at the top level, it's important that you regularly audit your Instagram Business Account. This will ensure you are meeting your goals and making the most of your Instagram presence.
An important part of performing an Instagram audit of your own account is to regularly update your password and enable two-factor authentication. It's also a good idea to review the third-party apps that have access to your Instagram account and revoke access to any app that you no longer use or don't trust.
By auditing your brand objectives, you can ensure that your Instagram audit is effective in helping you reach your business goals.
We have laid down the exact blueprint for conducting an Instagram audit of your account in this blog so that you can keep track of your account and progress. Let's start!
Table Of Contents:
- A Step-by-Step Simplified Approach To Conducting An Instagram Audit
- Ready To Soar Your Instagram Account To New Heights?
- FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.
A Step-by-Step Simplified Approach To Conducting An Instagram Audit
- Goal Setting
- Review Your Bio
- Choose The Right Instagram Marketing Tool
- Maximize Your Instagram Shop Presence
- Optimize Your Instagram Content
- Check Your Posting Frequency
- Optimize Your Publishing Time
- Analyze Your Account Insights
- Review Your Engagement Efforts
- Dissect Your Followers
Goal Setting
Social media, especially Instagram, can easily become a source of distraction for anyone. To avoid this, it's essential to set achievable goals for your Instagram Business Account regularly, such as monthly or quarterly.
Over the years, Instagram has made a lot of changes to its algorithm and now places more value on engagement, such as meaningful comments, saves, and shares, than just vanity metrics (likes and followers).
Even though there is less emphasis on followers and likes, it's recommended to set quantifiable goals, such as gaining more genuine followers over a period of time to increase your potential audience base.
Here are some examples of goals you might want to achieve through your presence on Instagram:
- Increase engagement on my feed to 60%
- Increase the number of followers by 1,500 genuine accounts each month
- Conduct 1 IGTV per month
- Generate 30% of online sales from Instagram
- Boosts brand awareness
- Generate quality leads
- Build a community of like-minded people
To fully utilize the platform's capability and beat its algorithm, it's recommended to use all of its features, including Stories, lives, and IGTV.
Your Instagram marketing goals can be related to numbers or even aesthetics but should ultimately align with your overall business objectives. Ask yourself how Instagram can help you achieve those objectives.
Read more about how to set strategic social media goals
Review Your Bio
Due to limited space, it's crucial to keep your Instagram profile clear and straightforward so visitors can easily understand your business and its purpose.
To make the most of the character limit in your Instagram bio, use keywords, brand hashtags, and emojis to make your profile ultra-discoverable and easy to understand.
Consider adding call-to-action buttons to your bio, if available.
Sharing links on Instagram is quite challenging. You are allowed to add links in your Stories, but the links in feed captions aren't clickable. That's why most businesses use the "link in bio" option to add the most critical link.
Instagram allows you to add just one link in your bio. So either you can add one crucial link, such as your website link, or add one link that contains a collection of other links. Linktree and Linkin.bio offers an option to create such a house of several links. This link directs users to a landing page where you can add various links, such as your blogs, YouTube channels, and product links. You can then add one Linktree or Linkin.bio link in your bio.
Learn more about 300+ superb Instagram bio ideas to use in 2023
Choose The Right Instagram Marketing Tool
Choosing the right marketing tools can save you time and effort while also providing valuable insights into your Instagram performance. Consider your workflow and identify areas where tools could provide a boost. For example, scheduling tools can help streamline your content creation process, while user-generated content tools can help you curate and share content from your followers.
Look for tools that align with your brand objectives and provide the features you need to achieve your goals. With the right tools in place, you can optimize your Instagram strategy and optimize your presence on the platform.
Statusbrew is a comprehensive social media marketing tool that can help you perform an effective Instagram audit. With its intuitive dashboard, you can track key metrics such as engagement rates, follower growth, and hashtag performance.
Statubrew also provides advanced scheduling and publishing capabilities, allowing you to plan and execute your Instagram content strategy easily. Its social listening features enable you to gain insights into your audience and competitors, thus helping you optimize your Instagram presence and drive business results.
If you are interested in seeing how Statusbrew can help you optimize your Instagram presence, book a free demo of the platform to learn more about its capabilities.
Maximize Your Instagram Shop Presence
Instagram allows you to include your products or services in both your feed posts and Stories, enabling people to simply tap and shop for whatever you are discussing.
This is an excellent opportunity for many small businesses to increase sales without investing in a website, so if that's one of your Instagram marketing goals (which we are sure it is), then this is definitely a feature you should take advantage of soon as possible.
For more information about setting up Instagram catalogs and showcasing your products, check out our blog on how to set up an Instagram shop in 2023
Optimize Your Instagram Content
Now it's time to get stuck into the content audit part.
Feed Content
To ensure your Instagram profile effectively conveys your brand message and its purpose, review the first 9-12 images on your feed. Ensure they visually align with your brand guidelines and communicate what you do. Consider whether a first-time visitor could understand your brand message from just a few of those images and their captions.
It's essential to have a good mix of content types on your feed, including single-image posts, carousels, IGTV, Reels, and promotional and non-promotional captions. This ensures that your profile is not solely focused on sales.
Use the 30 hashtag limit on each post and experiment with different hashtags to maximize reach. Remember, each hashtag and location on Instagram have their own pace and can be followed, so they are worth the effort.
Read more about 300+ best hashtags for Instagram in 2023
Statusbrew's Compose makes it easy for you to create and schedule Instagram image posts, Reels, and carousels for multiple Instagram accounts from the same dashboard.
You can see how your post will look before you publish it through live preview and make any necessary adjustments.
You can store and organize all of your brand's visual assets in one centralized location using Asset Manager, ensuring that your brand's content is always on-brand and visually consistent.
Stories
Instagram Stories are an excellent way to increase engagement, raise awareness, and expand your reach (which can ultimately boost your sales!).
You should also maintain consistent branding in your Stories. Additionally, leverage the various stickers available such as polls and questions, to encourage engagement and enhance your reach.
Were you aware you can use up to 10 hashtags in each Story? Make the best use of them by concealing them behind a GIF or matching their color to the background of the Story to avoid distraction, just as with location tags.
Don't forget that Stories have a life span of 24 hours, but you can always save the most important ones in your highlights.
Live
Engaging with your audience through live sessions is a fantastic opportunity. Going live on Instagram allows people to have conversations with you in real-time. It's an excellent option for conducting expert and customer interviews. There have been some remarkable uses of Instagram live by businesses, so if you haven't tried it yet and it aligns with your objectives, go for it!
IGTV
IGTV is an underrated feature on Instagram, but it's believed that those who use it have a higher chance of appearing on the Explore page and increasing their reach. You can use the link feature in Stories to link to your IGTV videos, regardless of your follower count.
This makes it easy to direct people to longer video content. If you have great videos on your YouTube channel already, consider uploading some of your most popular ones on IGTV over time to take advantage of the platform's exposure.
Check Your Posting Frequency
Do you find that your engagement on Instagram is low? One factor that could be affecting it is how often you are posting and when you are posting. It's essential to strike a balance between posting too frequently and not enough.
To increase your reach on Instagram, it is recommended to publish all post types at least once a week. Find your average posting frequency and the type of posts that perform well. If your posting frequency is less than 4 times a week, try to increase it. And if you are not experimenting with different post types, you should start right away.
Read more about how often to post on social media
Optimize Your Publishing Time
Optimizing your publishing time is important to get the most out of your Instagram presence. Consider when your audience is most active on the platforms. This can vary depending on your industry, target demographic, and time zone.
By posting at the right time, you can increase the visibility and engagement of your content.
Instagram Insights helps you determine the day of the week and time of day when your followers are active online. You can find an intersection between the two to optimize your posting schedule for maximum engagement.
But, Statusbrew helps you create a heat map of the best time to post on Instagram to determine which time of the day your audience remains the most active on the platform and schedule posts for those times.
Analyze Your Account Insights
Now, it's time to measure all those important goals you set initially.
Audience
Source: HubSpot
To track your quantifiable and even some of your qualifiable goals, it's essential to have an Instagram Business Account that provides access to its Insights feature.
The Insights feature on Instagram allows you to track your follower growth, top cities your audience belongs to, and demographics such as gender and age. By monitoring these metrics, you can identify areas where you can expand your audience base in a particular country or age group.
Activity
In this section, you can monitor your interactions, such as profile visits, web clicks, and emails. If one of your goals is to increase conversions, this is the place to measure it.
You can track your reach and impressions in the discovery section. This will help you keep an eye on your exposure. By comparing these metrics with your follower growth, you can determine if your content is successfully converting to followers over a given period of time.
Content
Instagram Insights enable you to analyze the performance of each content piece on your feed and Stories. This is particularly useful to identify which type of content works best for you, such as image posts, Reels, or Stories, so you can focus on creating more of what resonates with your audience.
If your goal is to increase your engagement rate, you can easily calculate it by dividing the number of likes and comments by your number of followers.
Instagram Insights do not provide all the metrics you might need to measure your efforts on the platform. That's why you can use social media management tools like Statusbrew to measure your Instagram activity precisely.
There are 180+ metrics in the Statusbrew dashboard to measure and dig deeper into every like, comment, and interaction on your profile.
Book a free demo of the platform to learn how we can help you evaluate your Instagram analytics in the easiest way possible!
Review Your Engagement Efforts
Communication and engagement are crucial on Instagram. Take a moment to review your recent posts and ensure that you have responded thoughtfully to comments and had authentic conversations with your followers.
Are there any posts that received particularly high engagement? If so, consider what elements made them successful and try to replicate those in future content. You can strengthen your relationship with your followers and grow your Instagram presence by continually improving your engagement efforts.
Ensure that you have replied to all of your direct messages, and avoid giving your audience the impression that you are ignoring them.
Being present and responding promptly to all the engagement and interactions received on your profile is essential.
If you want to remain prompt in replying to all incoming comments and DMs received on your Instagram profile, Statusbrew provides a unified inbox to sync all incoming conversations and even reply to those conversations from the same dashboard. In fact, you can even choose to get notified of incoming conversations to avoid missing out on any comment or message.
Book a free session to start managing your Instagram conversation efficiently & avoid delays in responses!
Dissect Your Followers
Regularly check for fake or bot accounts among your followers. This is crucial to maintain a high engagement rate on Instagram. Remember that fake and bot accounts will not engage with your content, and even if they do, they have no chance of becoming loyal customers. Check and remove these accounts regularly to ensure the authenticity of your followers.
By vetting the accounts that follow you and blocking any that appear spammy (i.e., no photos, no followers), you can maintain a clean and active following that is more likely to engage with your content.
Conduct this check at least once every quarter to ensure your Instagram strategy and account remain on track.
Use a social analytics tool like Statusbrew that helps you count not just the total number of followers but the number of followers who were online during the specified time period and allows you to gather insights on the age, gender, country, and city of your followers.
Know more about how to get more followers on Instagram & how to track Instagram followers growth
Ready To Soar Your Instagram Account To New Heights?
Now that you know how to perform your Instagram audit, it's time to implement these steps.
Use the tools and steps we have provided in this blog to make strategic changes to your content, captions, hashtags, profile, and track your progress over time.
Remember, an Instagram audit isn't a one-time task. It's an ongoing process that requires regular monitoring and adjustments to ensure your account is always performing at its best. With a little time and effort, you can take your Instagram presence to the next level and build a loyal following of engaged fans.
Statusbrew offers a suite of tools and features that can help you analyze your account's performance, track your metrics, and make data-driven decisions to improve your Instagram content strategy.
So why not give it a try and take your Instagram presence to the next level today?
Statusbrew is an all-in-one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and even Google My Business.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Here are some commonly asked questions about Instagram audits:
What is an Instagram audit?
An Instagram audit is a process of evaluating the performance of an Instagram account to identify areas for improvement and make strategic changes to improve its content and engagement.
How to audit followers on Instagram?
To identify fake followers of an Instagram account, you can use the HyperAuditor tool. The tool analyzes an account's audience quality and engagement authenticity. Type the account name in their fake follower tool's search bar and click Check. You will instantly get the audience quality score.
What tool to audit Instagram?
Iconsquare offers a free Instagram audit to help people analyze their accounts. You need to connect your Instagram and enter your email address. Then they will send you a free review showing where you are shining and where you are falling flat.
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