When Instagram was launched, online marketers were averse to using it due to the lack of powerful analytics tools. These tools would allow them to gauge whether their campaigns were working and whether it was at all a good idea to maintain a presence on the platform. Eventually, of course, some of them leaped faith because the popularity of the network was tempting, and the rest is history. Instagram-centric digital marketing and analytics tools were soon to follow. Today, you are almost spoiled for choice. Not only does Instagram provide fairly decent metrics to business accounts, but there are also a host of third-party applications that take business analytics to the next level.
As per HootSuite, Instagram analytics tools cannot be considered as merely vanity metrics or feel-good graphs. Instagram analytics are valuable and the most effective way of seeing if the budget, time, and energy devoted to the platform seem to be worth your effort or not.
Iconosquare
Several businesses choose to stick to their core competencies and outsource marketing efforts to specialist digital marketing firms. Iconosquare is one of the platforms that are ideal for firms that juggle multiple client accounts. It boasts a host of features including, growth tracking, as well as, ranking how well your posts perform for certain hashtags against your top competitors. You have access to a unified dashboard that lets you monitor and post across all your managed accounts. They also provide a host of excellent stock content that you can repurpose for your use and superb scheduling features so you can remain regular and active.
Iconosquare’s flexible pricing plans start from $29 per month. They offer a two-week free trial as well as customized plans for agencies and businesses. Further, they have also made a profile auditing feature free for business use that looks at a profile and its 30 latest posts to check whether it is complete and following their set of marketing best practices. You may buy real Instagram followers for boosting your follower count.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a departure from usual Instagram tools that gauge historical data and provide reports based on these insights. Their approach is to instead, give you real-time feedback across a variety of metrics. At any point, you can feed the tool a specific hashtag or keyword, or even an Instagram profile, and it will bring up a variety of trends that are currently revolving around it. Keyhole also lets you track your competitors alongside your own profile to see how you can differentiate yourself from them, avoid their mistakes, and perform better than them for the KPIs you value.
SocialFox
If you’re just starting or looking for a single tool to give you access to the broadest array of tracking features, SocialFox is your best bet. It tracks pretty much every metric you are likely to care about for your account in real-time, including follower growth, hashtag activity, click-through rate, engagement, and several others, presenting them in an engaging and intuitive unified dashboard. Whether you are doing content strategy for the next month or retrospective analysis of your previous marketing campaigns, SocialFox is an excellent tool for you. Pricing starts at $9 per month.
Quintly
Quintly is supposed to be an excellent dashboard tool covering multiple social networks. It boasts of a standard dashboard that can be custom-tailored with widgets as per your unique requirements. You may keep tracking the metrics that are important to your business. Quintly provides valuable Instagram analytics for fans and followers of your competitors’ profiles and your profile too. You can get detailed competitor follower statistics. Moreover, you can consider analyzing your Instagram content, details present on the filter page, and even interactions triggered from your videos and pictures. Quintly is covering Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube.
Socialbakers
Social bakers present a free and popular Instagram analytics tool. You are free to generate your dashboards. There are numerous areas to constantly maintain vigilance on the period that seems to be quite restricted in the free version. You will obtain valuable data and information relating to your top posts, tagged accounts, and used hashtags. You may see reach, impressions, and even interactions. You can use this tool for building your dashboards. The tool boasts of a simple-to-use or easy-to-navigate User Interface. This tool may not be hugely in-depth, but it is good enough for generating top-grade insights and analytics.
Union Metrics
Union Metrics provides an account checkup for free, and the relevant report will be generated utilizing some of the algorithms presented by the paid analytics platform. Union Metrics can come up with a report that is not comprehensive, but you should consider focusing your attention on a few posts or metrics for comparing them meticulously with your average to help you in identifying any themes or patterns. There is an opportunity to go about refreshing the report once every 24 hours. You can examine how newer posts are performing against the average.
Conclusion
One of the things you must keep in mind when selecting a third-party analytics tool for Instagram is that it is relying on the Instagram API, which is constantly changing and not really beholding to any other party. It means that the onus to keep up with these changes lies entirely on the developers of the other service, and if they are not proactive could mean the tool either doesn’t work or gives you incorrect or stale data. You may stick to these time-tested and popular tools as they give you the best shot at success.
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