It is important that your Instagram account is set up as a business profile. With that you will have access to Insights, a tool to help you understand your audience and the effectiveness of your posts. That information will help you grow.

Check out your Insights to see how your posts are preforming. Here are some things you can see there:

Activity

• interactions with your post

• website clicks

• profile visits

• reach

• impressions

Content

• posts

• stories

• promotions

Audience

• followers

• demographic information

Note that if you have under 100 followers, some of the above information will be limited. If you are a local business, the demographic details will help you determine if your efforts to reach local customers is successful.

You can also view Insights on individual posts. They will let you see if someone has clicked to your website or profile from the post and how the hashtags are performing. For local businesses, remember to use some local hashtags, like local towns or local sights. Another thing to note about hashtags is that you don’t want to use a hashtag like #inspirationalquotes, there are 13.1 million posts associated with that hashtag. Try #inspirationalthoughts (86.1K posts) or #inspirationalpost (125K posts).  You have a better chance of being seen from the hashtags if they are popular but not too popular.

All of this information can be used to help you develop an Instagram strategy to help grow your business and educate your customers. You want spend your time reaching people who want to buy from you and become loyal customers.

Theresa Mintzer can be reached at 484.686.2995; email: bytheresamarie@outlook.com; website: ByTheresaMarie.com.