The use of Instagram for marketing purposes is rapidly increasing and more than 70% of companies use this platform. Using Instagram is important for business, but it’s hard to know how successful you are. Without the right criteria for it, you never know if you can do more to attract an audience or increase followers.
There are many free Instagram analytics programs and tools to track progress and discover areas for improvement. In this article, we will review the best Instagram analysis programs, with which you can focus on Instagram content and take the necessary steps to optimize your Instagram profile.
Instagram analytics tools aren’t just feel-good graphs and vanity metrics: they’re the best way to see if all the time, energy, and budget you spend on the platform are, you know, worth it.
Instagram Insights
Instagram’s native analytics tool. It’s free, easy to understand at a glance, and shows you how your content is performing right now.
If you have a business account on Instagram, you automatically have access to the free Instagram Insights analytics tool. The Insights tool can show you where your Instagram audience is, which of your posts are more popular, and how many Impressions and Reach you have (if you have 1,500 impressions and 1,000 reaches, it means that some people will post more than one Times viewed).
Additionally, you can compare your original post with an advertised version of the post to see if the money you pay for it is worthwhile. Unfortunately, you can only use the app on this tool (it does not have a desktop version), and this is not the most user-friendly mode, but it does provide an overview of your Instagram analysis for each of your posts and your account in general.
Iconosquare
Iconosquare product is powerful analytics, management, and scheduling platform for brands and agencies. There is an extensive range of analyses on offer, which starts with an overview of activity in the last seven days or the last month.
A tab for content shows the distribution, density, tag, and filter usage, and geolocation. The engagement tab shows growth history, the source of engagement, and the most popular media.
The optimization tab covers posting times, average media lifespan, tag impact, and a breakdown of filter impact. Finally, for analysis there is a community tab, showing details about your followers and followings.
In addition to the analysis, there are ‘snapshots’; shareable images based on your Instagram data. You can view your media, likes, and followers, and manage comments. There’s also a feature that allows you to create a profile cover from your latest 50 photos, and a widget to showcase your Instagram photos on your website.
HypeAuditor
HypeAuditor is an in-depth tool you can use to discover and analyze your Instagram and YouTube accounts.
It is a bit like the Iconosquare free tool above, but a bit more in-depth and a bit more expensive. It’s available to any Instagram account with over 1,000 followers. It offers three plans, depending on your size and needs. One of these is a free plan which provides you with limited information on your linked account.
If you have higher needs, in particular, more detailed Instagram influencer discovery, you can buy the Starter or Business plans. Alternatively, if you just want detailed information on your Instagram account’s progress, you can buy a $30 report on your account (which is updated monthly for a year), with discounts for multiple reports.
Social Bakers
Socialbakers offer a free Instagram analytics tool. You are able to create your dashboards, and while there are lots of areas to look at, the time is fairly restricted with the free version.
You can see what your top posts are, most used hashtags and tagged accounts, plus general stats on your number of posts, and followers. also, You can see impressions, reach, and interactions too.
The fact you can build your dashboards is a big plus, while the UI is easy to navigate and simple to use. It’s not massively in-depth, but it’s good for top-level insight and analysis. Socialbakers comes in $20 per month per profile, but you can hook up accounts from loads of different platforms including YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
Phlanx
Phlanx offers a range of features to run your marketing. These include an influencer directory, collaborations, engagement calculators for Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Twitch, a contract generator, and perhaps most importantly here, an Instagram Influencer auditor. You can enter your own Instagram account to see how effective it is.
Although you can get your first month for free, you will need to buy a plan (ranging from $25 – $50/month if you want to take advantage of all of Phlanx’s capabilities.
Squarelovin
Squarelovin is an admirably in-depth tool for a free analytics platform. It displays metrics on recent posts and growth, a monthly analysis, and a history of your posts broken down into year, month, day, and hour.
Some tabs show engagement with your photos, both average and top posts, and an optimization tab that shows your best and worst times to post. You can also manage your Instagram account from within the platform, creating albums, and liking and commenting on other posts.
Sprout Social
Sprout is one of those huge names you see everywhere when talking about social media management. Their platform has some of the most advanced tools available for social media management across all platforms. They have a ton of features, including a multi-platform aggregated inbox, aggregated keyword monitoring and listening, publication and scheduling tools across platforms, a unified social calendar, mobile apps, and a baseline of 10 social profiles. For all that, it’ll run you about $100 per month.
