The prayers of social media managers across the world have been answered – Instagram has unveiled plans to make insights available to users.
When it comes to marketing, communications and all of the other disciplines that fall under the joint umbrella, it’s often all about the numbers. We’re always telling and being told that before you do anything, you must set goals and be able to measure them well.
However, we don’t always listen to our own advice (sorry!), and Instagram is a perfect example of our rebellion.
Pro communicators have been snapping and hashtagging away ever since the visual social media platform was launched in 2010, but for nearly four years we’ve had no solid way to measure our efforts beyond likes, comments, new followers and hashtag counts.
And now, although the company are being pretty vague about launch dates and whether it will do some pocket damage, Instagram has announced that an insights dashboard will become available sometime in the next few months.
The new analytics tools will allow users to track their profile’s potential reach, number of impressions and engagement rates. In addition – and this is the feature we’re itching to get our hands on – it will provide figures in regards to the age, gender and location demographics of their audience.
The roll-out will also include another dashboard for the creation and monitoring of Instagram ads in time for the launch of paid posts in Australia. Unfortunately access to Insti advertising is still an exclusive club for the cool kids, only available to “established brands with a sound understanding of the platform,” with big names like Ben and Jerry’s forking out upwards of US$350,000 a month for the service. Nonetheless, as social media managers we’re excited to see where it all goes.