How Do I Get Instagram Insights & How Do I Work Out My Engagement Rate?

Recently Instagram made it possible to access, for free, the kind of information about your following and engagement that had previously only been available by paying a third-party application. Do you have access to Instagram Insights? This guide will tell you how to get it and I'll also be publishing a guide to exactly how you can use the information that it provides to grow your Instagram following. I hope you find it helpful, if so, please do leave a comment.

I'll answer any questions in the comments too, don't be shy!

To access the special icon that takes you to your Insights, you need to have set up a Facebook Page. I don't mean, you need to have an account, you actually have to be the administrator of a Facebook Page. Go here for a description of the difference between a Page and a Group.

You can click the menu option along the navigation bar on Facebook to find out what pages you have created and are an admin of. If you haven't created a Page yet, you'll need to. You can set up a Page about anything, but if you are serious about promoting yourself as a blogger or Influencer, it won't hurt to have one dedicated to you. You can invite your real life friends to like the Page and drive more traffic to where you want it, Instagram or your blog or wherever. Facebook Pages can be a little slow to grow - but you don't need to have any followers to access Instagram Insights.

Once you've got the Page set up, head back over to Instagram and connect your Facebook and Instagram accounts. Click the three little dots on the top right of your profile page and scroll down to Account - the option to hook up Facebook to Instagram, turn your account into a 'Business' account and access Insights should be there.

You'll now have a little icon available to you that wasn't there before...

I have no idea why I am a 'Government Official', that clearly needs to change! The other thing that you'll notice is you will now have a little 'Contact' button under your public stats, this is connected to your email and allows brands and fans to get in touch with you on the email you signed up to Instagram with. It's worth making sure it's your current address.

Here are some extra facts about Insights that might help you get started:

• Insights are only available for images that you post after switching your account over to a business one, you won't be able to access stats from posts prior to that
• Each section has more information, swipe right to view more on each stat.
• Insights are also available for individual posts and you'll see a little 'Insights' link under your newly posted photos. What is the difference between Reach and Impressions? It's pretty simple - Reach is how many individuals your image has been seen by, impressions is how many times the image has been seen.

I'll leave you with a little formula you can use to work out your engagement rate. You can use this to work out whether you engagement is going up or down, whether you get more engagement on certain types of posts and you can also use it to pitch yourself to brands, who will be looking for the highest percentage possible!

Engagement (divided by) Reach = %

Here's an example from one of my posts this month -

66 (divided by) 343 = 0.192

0.192 x 100 = 19.2

This shows that 19.2% of the people that saw my post chose to interact with it.

These are really valuable statistics when it comes to brand endorsements. Brands will be looking for you to have an engagement rate of at least 20% to consider you for paid collaborations. Test the water by posting a few images tagging some of your favourite brands and seeing what your engagement rate is like. You'll need to leave the post up a day or so to get a balanced picture.

Pop back sometime, because I've got a post that delves much deeper into using your Insights to grow and develop your following lined up later this week - follow me on Twitter to stay updated :)

Katy x

Five Tips For Boosting Your Instagram Engagement & Following

Since I started my new job, at one of Britain’s leading modelling agencys, within their Influencer department, I’ve been exposed to so many incredible Instagram accounts. How did I not know about Symmetry Breakfast, for example?

I get emails every single day from budding social influencers wanting to be matched with brands and start earning money from their social following. I’ll be doing a series soon about how you can get yourself a blogging agent and what the benefits are, but I thought I’d kick of a new raft of social media school posts by giving away 5 tips for organically and honestly boosting your Instagram following. Don’t fret! I’ll still be posting all my usual content and still have some events posts coming up from our adventures at Bluedot Festival, Bures Festival and our upcoming trip to Portsmouth for the best fest in the west, Victorious 2016.  Okay, confession, it’s not in the west but that was a totally great rhyme…

A few industry secrets – in the Influencer marketing world, Engagement is ALL.  We don’t pitch to our clients based on follower data, although it obviously forms part of the bigger picture - we only take on Instagram Influencers with more than 40,000 following, for example. What we do present to our clients is Engagement. All of the tips I’m sharing today are centred around increasing engagement on your posts, and with increased engagement, your following will naturally grow too.

1. Respond to comments.

Everyone does the ‘post one emoji and run’ thing. It’s the equivalent of dropping just your blog link in a comment section on a bit site. It can sometimes be hard to know what to respond to an individual emoji, but rack those brains, tag the commenter and give a similar response – a heart will often do the job. Your thanks will draw the commentator back to your post for another chance to grab them as a follower. This, incidentally, is proven to work even better for gaining and retaining followers if you post another photo before responding to a batch of comments. 

2. Answer questions

I’m constantly being contacted by people looking to take the step in their blogging career. My first step in this situation is to check out their blog. If I see a bunch of answered comments or questions in their comments section of twitter feed, I’m going to assume that the person isn’t actually interested in starting online conversations, in communicating. Since they aren’t in the habit of responding to comments now, how can I have faith that if I match them up with one of our brands, they will engage with potential customers of that brand and drive traffic in the correct way? Real Influencers understand that they need to build a community for their brand to be successful and that involves positive interactions within your communication platforms.

3. Be real, share your true self.

This is common sense. If you are in a great looking place, eating fabulous food or hanging out with interesting people, get a snap and post it up. Take advantage of every opportunity that you have to tag and link  places and events in your posts. Be that guy that asks at the bar if they have a hashtag and take an exciting photo of you having a fun time. This will start introducing you to the types of brands that would fit well with your stream – because it’s the kind of content that you are sharing anyway. Take this one step further – once you made the post, click the linked hashtag and like or comment on two or three other photos that have used the same tags. This will build your following by bringing your account to the attention of people interested in the type of things that you are doing, and it’s all natural!

4. Keep it positive

The party line here is that we and our Influencers do not respond in any way to negative comments. However much you might be tempted to fire back a snappy remark, don’t. Brands like to see people dealing with negativity in the best way possible – there is NO way to respond to trolls and come across as someone who has a grip on their social community. Don’t delete the comment, just reply to a different one, so it’s obvious you’ve seen it and decided it’s not worth your time. That doesn’t stop you keeping it there as part of your total comment count – increasing your personal engagement stats! Obviously, if it’s sweary, or reveals something you wish wouldn’t be on the internet, delete, delete, delete – but no major social influencer gets ONLY positive comments. Stay true – just make sure you show it has no effect on your positive vibes. 

5. Follow the trail

It takes time and energy to build an Instagram following – you will not wake up one day with 100K followers without putting the legwork in. This means getting out there and commenting on other people’s posts, engaging with them and following people with mutual interests. I like to do something called ‘following the trail’ I’ll start with an account that’s commented on me, and I’ll give them a few likes and comments. I’ll find a pic with another user tagged, or a really positive comment and follow that to a different account. I’ll give a few likes and comments, find another tagged account…until I come full circle or run out of time. This is a great way to discover new account ts that will be interested in your content.

Boosting engagement is all about getting the right followers, commenting on your posts. There’s no point in having a million followers from Columbia (a prime region that shows up in insights when someone has bought a lot of followers) if none of them ever interact with your content – the key is to organically grow your following by finding accounts that fit in with your aesthetic. 

I hope these helped someone out there, don’t forget to drop a comment below if you found any of these tips useful – please also share your own tips or experiences, I love reading them!

I’ll be back early next week with the start of my series on Blogger Agents, the How and Why.

Katy x

Bounce Rate 101

 Bounce Rate is one of those Analytics stats that is easy to dismiss.  But it's an important one that, if you work on it, will lead to improved readership and more dedicated readers who return again and again.

Bounce rate is shown as a percentage in Google Analytics. It is shown in other ways in other analysis programs. Although I talk about Analytics here, the same information is relevant for whichever program you use to analyse your stats. If you are interested in how the rate is worked out, you can read the wikipedia page here.

It's basically a show of how many people came to the page and then left within a certain time (usually 30 mins) without exploring your site further. The average is around 50% for a regular, article bearing website or blog. Bear in mind that if your site is a one-stop-shop, like a dictionary, this will probably be higher because the visitor will find what they want on that one page they visited and not really need anything else from you!

As a blog owner, you want your articles to draw people in, but for them also to explore your other content, and find it relevant and interesting. You want a low bounce rate because you don't want people taking one look and fleeing because they don't find your blog interesting enough *sadface*

Here are three ways that you can improve your Bounce Rate.

1. Focus on just a few areas.

Chances are, if someone has come to your blog through a link to a DIY on Pinterest, they might quite possibly have an interest in other DIY's that you have written. If the rest of your blog is about collecting antique doorknobs, that traffic is likely to move on elsewhere. I have focused my blog on Social Media articles, craft DIY's and nail tutorials. I enjoy writing about these three areas and find it quite easy to think up posts relating to them. Focusing on just one thing would get a little boring, let's be honest. I like to rotate my topics over a week. However, I know that if people are coming in from pinned DIY's, like my Christmas Bauble DIY which brings in around 200 visitors a day, they will probably like some of my other DIY's and posts about crafty stuff. I hope they will stay and explore what else I have to offer along those lines.

2. Make other content easily accessible

It's all very well having the kind of content that people are coming to your blog for, but if they can't find it, it's utterly pointless. If you have a glance around my blog right now, you'll see there are at least 4 places that you can click through to other articles that might be of interest to you. At the top of my sidebar on the right you'll see a little section of four thumbnails. This is my four most popular (based on pageviews) articles. I haven't chosen them, I installed a blogger widget to chose the top four. Since they are the most popular, I assume they will be of interest to the most people. It kind of annoys me that two of the spaces are filled with Ombre French Manicure posts! And look, there is that Christmas Bauble DIY again! I actually put the widget there  there because I redirected my old blog where the tutorial was originally posted and I was worried people wouldn't be able to find it. I knew it would show up as it remains by far my most viewed post. I think it's contributing heavily to my current low bounce rate! Other ways that readers can find interesting content is my LinkWithin widget, see below the post where it suggests other articles you might like? Good idea huh? You can get your own for pretty much any blogging platform from here. Then I have a list of recent posts with my thumbnails (I talk about the importance of a relevant thumbnail image for your regular posts here). Plus I think I have a pretty easy navigation bar there at the top, find out how to make your own image map here. Of course, I also link previous posts a lot, which I hope draws readers deeper into my blog. Common sense right?

3.Target the right audience.

So now you have all your great content and you have it easily accessible from the very first page that traffic lands on. All you need is to get the right people over to your blog! This is a much bigger subject than I can cover in a few short paragraphs but here's a quick idea that I like to recommend to my brand awareness clients.

Dream up your ideal 'customer'. Start with the obvious demographic stuff, age, sex, background. Where do they shop? What kind of friends do they have? What websites do they visit daily? What are their hobbies? Build a complete picture of the type of person you imagine that you are aiming at. Do you know anyone like that, or who has many of their characteristics? Really go into detail once you have the basic picture. Who do they follow on twitter? What do they do on Friday night? What kind of boards do they have on Pinterest? How would you imagine they would stumble upon YOU?

It's important to remember that even though you have the idea of who your target market is, not many people are going to fulfil all of these characteristics. But it should give you a strong idea of the right places to look to find potential blog readers. Don't pigeonhole people! Even just one of your 'ideal' customers charastistics might be enough to make them a good match for your blog. The kind of information you can gather from this is:

• Forums and blog rolls that might prove to be a good Return On Investment for you
• Other areas that you might not have thought to focus on
• People/companies to follow on twitter and Pinterest and engage with in the future

The other key point to this is that you can see whether you are being too specific. You want your potential audience to be as wide as possible. Think about how many people realistically you are aiming at. If you are writing only about motorcycle games for the Nintendo 64, your target demographic is people who have and still play a Nintendo 64, and who also like motorcycle games. I think that's quite a small market. If you want a big audience, you need to be appealing to a big audience.

Once the right people find your blog, they will be interested in what you have to offer. This will lead to a lower Bounce Rate. Stats are not everything, that's important to remember. But keeping people reading will ultimately increase the success of your blog and your online profile.

I love feedback on my articles! If you have found this interesting or useful, please do leave a comment or click the +1 for Google+. You can also add me on LinkedIn and I'm greatful for endorsements on there, as I use my profile to obtain freelance Social Media work :-)

Katy x