Leveraging Insights to Optimize Social Media Posts

Are you struggling to understand why some of your content pieces perform better than others? The solutions is to use your Insights!

Insights can be found on Facebook or Instagram, and can easily paint a picture of your content’s performance. With the provided data,  you can determine what your audience is wanting to see from you.

If your practice is looking to up their content strategy while producing strong performing posts, check out this blog post covering how to understand your Insights to optimize your posting.

Insights 101

We won’t go too in-depth about Insights however we do think its important to highlight what it is and where you can find your practice’s insights.

The most important tip to utilizing your insights is make sure your Instagram and Facebook pages are turned on as Professional accounts. This means that you either have it labeled as a Business Account or a Creator Account. To figure out if you have a professional account, here are the guidelines:

Insights On Instagram

Go to your Instagram mobile application and click your profile photo in the bottom right corner. From there, go to the menu bar and find settings. Once you have your settings menu open, click on account and scroll to the bottom. If it says “Switch to a professional account” then you currently have a personal account. If it says “Switch to a personal account” then you have a professional account.

Insights On Facebook

In order to have a business account on Facebook you will need a page for your practice. A page is different than a profile. Think of a page as a listing for your practice, it will have all the information and followers can interact with your business there. A profile is an overview of you. As a profile you can like or follow your page.

The Professional Dashboard, aka your Insights page, will give your practice the tools that they need to track account performance, access, discover professional tools, and explore educational information. With the promise of streamlining your administrative tasks, the Professional Dashboard gives you an easy-to-access location to house all the necessary content performance tools. 

If you are looking to learn more about the Professional Dashboard on Instagram, check out our blog post where we do a deep dive into how to track your Instagram’s performance. 

Using your Content Reach to see your Top Performers

One of the top options for using your Insights is to gain an understanding of the types of content your followers want to see from you.

It may not be apparent just by looking at your posts what is reaching the most amount of people. In fact unless you dive into insights, you may not even see how many people you are reaching.

By looking under the Accounts Reached section, you can review what content reached the most amount of people. Within this category you’ll see information for each of your content types including top posts, top stories, top IGTV videos, and top reels. From this information you can gain an understanding of what is generating the biggest impact on your account.

Once you have determined the top content types, take a look at each of the posts. What made them different? Did you use a more engaging caption? Was it paid or organic content? Maybe your image quality was better than in other ones? Thinking about all of these things can help you narrow down exactly what your followers want.

Track Your Followers

Insights offers details about how your followers interact not only with your content but also within the app.

One of our favorite features in Insights is being able to view how many of your followers are on the app at any given time. You can filter by days of the week and by hours on each of those days.

By understanding this information, you will be able to schedule your posts at the exact times most followers are active on the platform.

Under this section you can also look at your follower demographics. This can be useful to understand as well because you want to know if it matches your brand’s target audience. For example, if all of your followers are from New York City, NY but you are in Seattle, WA you may want to readjust your organic and paid social strategy to ensure you are reaching a local audience. If you are having trouble with this, reach out to our social media team and we can give you some pointers on how to adjust your social media strategy.

Review Your Profile Activity

Your Profile Activity shares data on how many times people have taken an action on your profile. Whether this is a profile visit or clicking a call-to-action button on your profile. By doing this you can easily understand what sorts of actions your content is making people take.

From understanding these actions, you can better set up your paid social media advertising. For example, if you are trying to get your audience to schedule a free consultation by giving your office a call, but you continue to only receive messages about consultations, you will want to guide your traffic to your call-to-action button, so they know it’s there.

Your profile activity will tell you the activity your audience is taking. If you are not happy with some of the actions that they are taking, think of some creative ways that you can move your audience’s attention.

Final Thoughts

There are plenty of other ways that you can use your insights to optimize your posting. However, starting with these three tips can really help to make a positive difference in your posting. 

As always, if you have any questions regarding your social media profiles, reach out to our team and they can help answer any of your questions.

—Marie Dubray, Social Media Specialist, Sesame Communications