How To Use Instagram Analytics To Grow Your Followers

Are you trying to grow your Instagram followers and build an audience for your business, personal brand or blog? With so many statistics and metrics to monitor on Instagram, it can be difficult to keep track of the most important ones. In this post, we’ll show you how to use your Instagram analytics to grow your followers organically - without having to engage in odd tactics such as buying followers.

Why you need to track your Instagram analytics

Instagram is an amazing platform to attract new customers and engage with your audience. But without analytics, you’ll end up sharing content that YOU THINK they’ll like and hope for people to engage with it. But that’s a mistake! Analytics help you understand what you’re doing right and it can also stop you from making mistakes that can hurt your growth. Ready to start tracking the BEST Instagram insights for growth? Keep reading.

5 Ways to Leverage Instagram Analytics To Grow Your Followers

1. Choose the best metrics for followers growth

To make the best of your Instagram strategy, you shouldn’t track every metric. That would be very time consuming and unless you’re a social media analyst, you’re not going to find all the data helpful. Instead, choose metrics that are relevant for your goal. Want to grow your Instagram followers? Focus on these metrics:

• Followers
• Impressions
• Reach
• Top posts
• Active hours
• Top hashtags
• Engagement rate

Pro tip: Quickly track your stats from one dashboard using Sharemyinsights.com

2. Improve your Instagram strategy with insights so you can grow your followers

Things change very fast on social media and you need to stay on top of your starts to make better decisions. Use real-time data to track your performance against your goal and make updates to your Instagram strategy as you progress. Once you find that your followers don’t engage with a certain type of content, you can quickly react and change your strategy, so you can continue to grow. Many factors impact on whether you grow on Instagram. But we’ve summarised the top most common in the checklist below:

• effective audience targeting
• relevant and valuable content pillars
• engaging captions
• effective hashtags
• promotional campaigns (paid ads)
• collaborations with other accounts
• sponsorships
• influencer posts

... and more. Ask yourself: “Does my current content strategy help me grow my followers?” And “What can I do differently to get more followers?”

3. Create posts that your audience loves

Stop guessing what type of content will or won’t resonate with your followers. Your Instagram analytics will show you which are the top posts by engagement, reach or likes. So you can create more posts like that and schedule them in advance knowing that they’ll love it! Use your stats to find out:

• Do images or carousel posts perform better than videos?
• Does the choice of colour or imagery have any impact on top posts?
• Which one gets more likes: educational, motivational or funny content?

Example: In the last 30 days, carousels and images showing my face performed better than motivational quotes and educational content. Also, the paid content had the best reach. 

4. Connect with your audience

Instagram is the #1 platform for engagement, so if you’re not making use of it to build a community and relationship with your followers you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Track your post engagement stats and use them to understand which posts are the most liked, commented, saved and shared on the platform. Think: “What makes people comment more on certain posts?” And don’t forget about Instagram stories! Stories are great for building that 1:1 connection with your audience. You can also track Stories insights and see how they performed.

5. Monitor your insights regularly

Once you have decided on the best metrics to track on Instagram, you can create a worksheet and update it with monthly stats. But if you find that tedious, just know that there are analytics  apps that allow you to create your custom report templates based on your stats. This will make your job easier, especially if you’re a social media manager and building reports for your clients is time-consuming. Pro tip: Let the analytics software do the hard work. Just set up auto-reports to receive weekly/monthly reports sent to your inbox.

Conclusion

Now you know every metric you need to track if you want to grow your followers on Instagram. Let us know, which metrics are you going to track?

Related: you can make money from a smaller Instagram following too.

The metrics that pull against each other, and which one to sacrifice first

Nobody tells you that Instagram analytics often point in two directions at once. Chase the metric that makes your ego feel good and you can quietly wreck the metric that pays your bills. Before you touch the Insights tab again, decide which trade-off you're willing to make, because trying to win all of them at once is how accounts stall at 5,000 followers for two years.

• Reach versus saves and shares. Reels with trending audio get you reach. Carousels with dense, useful information get you saves and shares. Reach grows your follower count fast but with people who forget you within a week. Saves and shares grow it slower but with people who come back. If your goal is followers you can sell to later, pick saves over reach every time, even when the reach numbers look worse in the dashboard.
• Follower count versus follower quality. A giveaway or a follow-for-follow push will spike your numbers. It will also tank your engagement rate for months, because the algorithm now thinks your average follower doesn't care about your content. Before running any growth tactic, ask whether it brings in people who match your niche, or just people who like winning things. If it's the latter, skip it no matter how tempting the follower jump looks.
• Posting frequency versus content quality. Insights will show you that more frequent posting usually means more total reach across the week. It rarely shows you that each individual post gets a smaller slice of attention, because you're competing with yourself. Decide in advance whether you're optimising for volume (fine if you have a team or templates) or for impact per post (fine if you're solo and stretched). Don't try to do both, you'll do neither well.
• Chasing what worked versus testing what's new. Analytics tell you what already worked, not what will work next month. Lean too hard into "the algorithm loves this" and you end up making the same video forever, which eventually bores your existing audience even as it might convert new people. Set a rule, something like 80% proven format, 20% experiment, and review it monthly rather than reacting to every dip.
• Time spent analysing versus time spent creating. Insights are addictive because they feel like progress. They aren't. An hour spent digging into demographic breakdowns is an hour not spent on the next post. Cap your analytics review to a fixed slot, weekly is usually enough, and treat anything beyond that as procrastination dressed up as strategy.

The honest answer to "which metric should I chase" is: the one that matches what you're trying to build. A personal brand chasing speaking gigs should sacrifice reach for saves and DMs. A product-based account chasing sales should sacrifice follower count for click-throughs. Pick your endpoint first, then let that decide which analytics trade-off you accept.

Quick answers

Should I prioritise reach or engagement rate when growing followers?

Prioritise engagement rate if you want followers who convert later, prioritise reach if you're purely after visibility for a launch or event. Long term, engagement rate is the better indicator of an audience worth having.

Is it worth buying followers to improve my analytics baseline?

No. Bought or fake followers crush your engagement rate permanently and Instagram's algorithm reads that as a signal to show your content to fewer people, not more. Any short-term vanity gain costs you real reach afterwards.

How often should I check my Instagram analytics?

Weekly is enough for most accounts. Daily checking encourages reactive posting based on noise rather than pattern, and monthly is too slow to catch a format that's clearly not working.