If you have an Instagram Business Account, you would know that your Instagram Marketing performance would directly impact your organizational outlook, sales, and lead customers. To always stay on top of your branding game, you most probably already know that you’ll need to do an Instagram Audit to improve your performance and engagement within your Instagram account. Audits are critical if you wish to ultimately reach your marketing goals and organizational KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
Henceforth, we’ve created a step-by-step guide that you as a brand account could apply to enhance your social media platform marketing efforts and minimize dwindling rates in your Instagram engagement and performance.
What’s An Instagram Audit?
First off, let’s explain an Instagram Audit and why it’s necessary for any organization on Instagram to apply audit assessments to improve its social media platform and organization.
An Instagram Audit is an evaluation review or assessment of Instagram business or creator accounts. It reviews the brand Instagram profile to examine whether the accounts’ engagements and performances meet the business goals, KPI, and brand outcomes the company or the owner wanted to achieve through their social media marketing strategy on Instagram.
Instagram audits allow brands to tweak Strategies based on current performance impressions. It’s imperative to apply an Instagram audit in constant time intervals. Audits allow Instagram profile accounts to eliminate the risk of devoting unnecessary time and resources to activities and content that aren’t reaching any goals or targets that brands are aiming to attain. Hence, the importance of the Instagram Auditing step by step guide.
A Step-by-Step Instagram Audit Guide That Improves Your Instagram Account And Business Growth.
As mentioned, to create a strong impression and a more robust Instagram Marketing Strategy, it’s essential to conduct an Instagram audit in a consistent time interval. Hence, the short 7 step instruction guide to your brand’s improvement through our Instagram Audit input.
Step 1: Audit Initiation Outline
Before running an Instagram Audit, you would first need to reanalyze your business goals and KPIs. As the account holder, you must answer questions like:
- What do you want to achieve from the brand’s Instagram Strategies, marketing, and Account Profile activity?
- What is the brand voice, and what would the audience receive from your brand awareness?
- What are the target Business Goals, and how many is your account meeting with the current Platform Marketing Strategy?
By analyzing the above questions, you can restrategize your overall brand’s social media marketing objectives depending on the social media campaign currently being applied.
Step 2: Instagram Content Audit
Without consistent Instagram Content, your social media platforms’ campaign strategy wouldn’t resonate with the target audience you wish to reach and engage. Thus, the importance of assessing your Instagram’s posted material and analyzing what kind of content is best for your profile and Instagram branding strategy.
2.1 Content Quality
Firstly on your Instagram’s shared Content, Auditing comes to the quality assessment of your posted materials. So, you as an organization must review:
- What is the resolution of the posted images and videos, and are they high enough?
- Are images or video posts blurry or unclear?
- Is the imagery within video and photo posts’ sizes too big or small?
Your account’s credibility depends on the material you post, so it could ultimately drag your profile impression, aesthetic, and reputation down. So post your feed material in 1080 x 1080 Pixels and the Instagram stories in 1080 x 1920 Pixels for maximum impression and quality.
2.2 Content Relevance
If you wish to engage with your audience, you’ll need to post relevant, exciting materials and address the points your strategy wishes to reach. Review your content using the free native Instagram Insight Tool to analyze:
- Most successful posts and their features
- Most minor successful posts and their features
- The type of content that has extracted the most engagement based on views, likes, comments, shares, and saves.
- The most extracted views, likes, comments, shares, and saves based on the timing posted.
2.3 Content Posting Schedule
It’s a no-brainer that posting time matters, particularly on social networking promotions. You’ll need to assess:
- If the Instagram posts are sufficient or too little.
- What are the best times to post for your profile, target industry, audience, demographics, and performance attainment?
- Current performance status and engagement based on your applied “best times to post” strategies.
We’ll advise that apart from checking your own accounts’ “best time to post” posting frequency and consistency times, you should also review brands’ competitors and other industry profiles. This way, brand and creator accounts can create Instagram posts that best fit their brand’s initiatives and profile targets.
2.4 Content Mix
The type of content mix you utilize for your Instagram posts is critical to your strategy’s performance, the engagements driving the audiences, and ultimately your Instagram’s growth rate. So, Assess:
- The overall mix of materials posted in your profile. For example, the combination of Photos, Videos, Reels, Stories, Lives, carousels, and IGTVs.
- The promotional and non-promotional mix of the materials posted on the profile and the audience responses towards the combination.
- The frequency and consistency of user-generated content shared.
- How the current mix of materials has been received, what industry competitors are doing, and whether you’re sharing the right combination of materials.
Through this content mix assessment, your organization can generate a well-rounded feed that:
- Accurately represents your branding.
- It gives your organization a format of the mix of materials that could be posted.
- Includes the videos, photos, carousels, shoppable Instagram stories and posts, Reels, motivational Quotes, promotional and non-promotional material, or IGTVs required.
Step 4: Captions Review
Your caption is your first impression of the posted materials. It’s the source of context and the brakes that stop audiences from swiping across your post from their feed. To analyze your captions, you must answer example questions like:
- What are the captions to the top posts, and how it helped in the engagement rates?
- Did the followers prefer short and engaging or long and in-depth titles?
- What type of captions are most valued by your followers: fun, riddles, questions, sayings, educational, or blog-like.
Once captions are analyzed based on your Instagram followers’ responses, you’ll be able to replicate or re-strategize your tactics based on the results.
Step 5: Instagram Hashtags
Instagram Hashtags play a critical role in the Instagram Algorithm’s selection of your content. It’s critical to use hashtags if you wish to be seen on Instagram’s Explore Feed and followers feed, and thus the importance of assessing them to see which hashtag has best worked for your branding’s growth. You’ll need to assess:
- Which niche hashtags have been most relevant to your accounts’ performance.
- Which relevant hashtag has gained you the most visibility in past shared content?
- How many hashtags per post have been most effective for your accounts’ performance.
- Research niche and industry hashtags that help you grow your account but currently haven’t been utilized by yourself.
Try to utilize a tool like the free Instagram Audit tool native to Instagram or a free third-party tool outside the platforms’ app to analyze your used hashtags and their performance. Also, research to find specific hashtags that are used in your industry by other competitions.
Step 6: Followers And Fake Followers Assessment
Another important step is the assessment of your followers and following. An important aspect of your marketing tactics is analyzing your followers and following ratios. Along with the number of fake followers in your account. You must:
- Remove any accounts that you’re unnecessarily following and so ruining your following followers’ ratio.
- Weed out the fake followers who are either inactive or purely bot followers that wish to be authentic. You wouldn’t want to have a disproportionate number of actual vs. fake followers because though your followers’ number may be high, your engagements would definitely be on the short side.
To weed out the fake number of followers, you should use tools like Fake Follower Check By Modash or the free Instagram Audit Tool By Influencer Marketing Hub.
Step 7: Instagram Account And Profile Identity Display
Finally, no Instagram Audit would be complete without a profile, branding, and organizational identity assessment. If you want to grow your Instagram performance, check:
- Check your Instagram Bio. Make Sure it reflects your brand’s identity in the most comprehensive yet expressive way possible. Don’t forget to put your website link in your bio. Instagram Bio is critical since it’s your followers’ source of reference. So in your bio, include address, contact information, website link, Facebook Link, industry category, and call-to-action buttons.
- Please take a look at your Profile Picture, ensure it’s simple, or use your logo as a profile picture. However, do use high-quality images.
- Check and audit your Instagram Story highlights cover photos, categories, and groupings. The Saved Instagram Stories that are made into highlights are a great link to your brands’ identity. Ensure it’s consistent with your displayed identity in your account. Do use highlight covers to create a better-unified impression between the bio, highlights, and post feed.
- Check the overall aesthetic of your feed. For the most pleasant first impressions for audiences, utilize the 9 Grid feed Layouts. Layouts like; Squares, Diagonal, Tiles, Row-by-Row, Lined Feeds (In Columns), Rainbow feeds, Border, Puzzle, or mixed.
A Brand Improvement That’s Driven From Your Instagram Account Audit
Once you have applied the 7 steps to auditing your account, you can do a final assessment, ensure it’s consistent throughout the profile, and start setting a new roadmap or tweak the old one. Using the insights from the Instagram audit, your brand may continue its branding with a modified version that brings maximum branding return of investment and a new boost. An investment return that’s obtained from the Brand Marketing Strategy you created after the Account Audit.
However, account audits should be done at least once per year or every 3 to 6 months, depending on the increase in followers or engagement. Through applying our auditing steps, you can sit back, enjoy, and wait for your brand growth obtained from Instagram Profile Audits that ultimately will improve your business most effectively.
