Are you looking at Instagram to boost your digital and social media marketing efforts?
If you are, the first vital step you need to do is to truly understand who your customers and targeted consumers are, and to make them members of your brand’s Instagram community.
Doing so will help you to engage them in the long run as part of your social media campaign.
How do you go about learning who your followers and potential customers are?
Demographics of Instagram Followers
The number of followers you work with can be a strong indication of the people interested in your content. However, it is useless to have a large following if your engagement is superficial or limited.
To prevent this, you need to have a good understanding of the demographic profile of your potential customers.
Demographics are basically customer analytics information broken down into areas like sex, income, age, education, geographic location, and so on. There are several ways to gather the demographics of your followers:
1) Check out your followers’ accounts
Scroll through your followers’ list and gather some general information. You can tell their gender and perhaps age, provided they are public accounts.
This is technically the long-winded route and is not an efficient way in getting data but it gives you a rough gauge.
2) Get external help
If you don’t have the time and manpower to figure out patterns between followers manually, leave it to the experts! I would recommend that you consider StarNgage, our own proprietary Instagram analytics solution. Just sign up for brand or influencer account and off you go1
With StarNgage, you can sort out your Instagram followers by keyword, location, sex, and other variables. You can also tell when your followers are most active and the content which they engage most actively with you on. Just to name a few criteria.
Here is a screenshot showing how it could look like:
Frequency of Usage
As reported by Pew Research Centre on the ‘Social Media Update 2014’, half (49%) of Instagram users are on it daily. And out of those, 32% of them go on Instagram several times a day.
How do you find out the times when your followers are most likely to be on Instagram? Well, you can use an Instagram analytics tool like StarNgage!
Check your account frequently. Determine the time in which you normally get the most likes or most comments on your photo.
This gives you an idea of when to post your photos for maximum engagement. Be it early in the morning when people are commuting to work, during lunch break or before bedtime.
Most Popular Content
Do also find out what kind of pictures your followers like to interact on. Do they enjoy getting to know you and your colleagues through selfies? Or do they like and comment on your “behind the scenes” photos of your work or new product/event?
Once again, you can find out using a platform like StarNgage to map out what your most popular content is. Here is a screenshot to show you how it looks like.
Follow Other Instagram Accounts
Besides waiting for your customers to follow you, consider following them! You don’t want to be seen as anti-social or stuck up on Instagram.
However, you shouldn’t indiscriminately follow everybody but choose loyal and regular fans with interesting and relevant content.
A nice social media gesture like this can trigger fan conversations with their friends. For example, you can start by asking: “Have you seen this Instagram account? They have recently followed me…” This leads straight into a positive word-of-mouth effect.
In return, you may also draw inspirations from customers and attract more like-minded people.
What other strategies do you apply to know your customer better?Instagram AnalyticsFree Instagram Analytics
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