Simply Measured’s Ultimate 2017

INSTAGRAM EBOOK
TABLE OF CONTENTS INTERMEDIATE: OPTIMIZING YOUR STRATEGY

INTRODUCTION Experiment With Segmented Analysis

LEVERAGING INSTAGRAM’S RECENT UPDATES Product vs. Product

BASIC: INSTAGRAM DEFINITIONS AND METRICS Segmentation

Show Off The Details Results

Map It Out Blog Strategy

Food Pics on Fleek Link In Profile Approach
Make a Puzzle Partner With And Regram Influencers
Read The Fine Print
Understand What Engages Your Target Audience
Instagram Live Is The New Instagram Stories The Most
Make Instagram Live Its Own Channel Employ a Sophisticated Hashtag Strategy
Choose Whether You Want Visible Comments
Instagram Stories
Take Your Influencer Marketing Program Off
ADVANCED: DRIVING BUSINESS VALUE
Training Wheels
This Is Brand Discovery at Its Finest Find Your Next Instagram Campaign Theme

Engagement Metrics Measure The Performance Of Your Brand’s Content

Likes Run Competitive Analysis

Comments Drive Engagement And Brand Awareness

Total Engagement Identify And Measure The Success Of Your Influencer

Engagement per Post Campaigns

Engagement as a % of Followers Optimize Towards Business Outcomes

Hashtag Mentions Identify Which Content Drive The Most Engagement

Hashtag Volume and Conversion

Hashtag Reach Determine Which Digital Advertising Channels Yield

Hashtag Impressions The Highest Conversion Rates

Instagram Stories Extract More Insight Into How People Find Your
Brand’s Website
View Count

View Rate CONCLUSION

ABOUT SIMPLY MEASURED
Drop-off Rate
 INTRODUCTION
Instagram is top-of-mind for any social marketer in 2017, and with a community of 600
million users (100 million of which were added in the last half of 2016), it’s no surprise
that brands have been flocking to the rapidly growing network in droves.

The photo-sharing network has evolved into a photo-, video-, and GIF- sharing network.
It’s even become a competitor with Snapchat for live video with its introduction of
Instagram Stories and Instagram Live, and a competitor with Pinterest with its recently
released “Save” feature. MarketingLand tells us that “15 to 25 percent of the people who
see a link in an Instagram Story are swiping on it, according to a handful of brands and
publishers that have been experimenting with the feature.”

The mobile app even has a full network of “feature” apps like Hyperlapse, Layout, and
Boomerang, boasts an intuitive Direct Messaging service, and has developed a robust ad
platform. Instagram Ads include photo, video, and carousel formats now, and marketers
can gain insight into the business results they’re achieving with these investments, from
website conversions to mobile app downloads.

Whether your brand is just starting to invest time and energy in Instagram, or is an
established powerhouse on the network, you’ll want to understand the basic definitions
and metrics at the beginning, optimize your strategy in your intermediate stage, and
focus on driving business value if you are in the advanced stage. Through research
and measurement, you can develop a solid foundation of what works, what doesn’t,
and what to focus on for your specific brand. This guide to Instagram analysis and
optimization outlines the metrics required to measure and fully understand Instagram,
and walks through some tips for using these metrics to plan and optimize your Instagram
campaigns.optimize your Instagram campaigns.

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 Leveraging Instagram’s Most Recent Updates
Here’s what happened to Instagram in 2016.

February 2016: Instagram debuts view counts for videos

March 2016: Instagrammers gain the flexibility to tell their stories in up to

60 seconds of video.

April 2016: Instagram rolls out on Windows 10 Mobile

May 2016: Instagram gets a fresh new look.

July 2016: Instagram makes it easier to find videos in the Explore feature by
adding video channels.

August 2016: Perhaps the biggest Instagram development for Instagram in 2016.
Instagram Stories debut.

Snapchat pioneered this “in-the-moment” idea with branded content, and quickly
became a force to be reckoned with. Then Instagram launched Instagram Stories.
With over twice the number of MAUs as Snapchat, Instagram Stories has become a new
playground for brands on social media. Here’s why.

1. Natural and Experimental: Instagram has always been the place to highlight the best-
quality images from brands, supported by a range of clever filters and editing tools. But
Instagram Stories, as Kevin Systrom explained, allows “filling in the space in between
— and becoming more about visual expression in general – capturing all the world’s
moments, not just the best ones”.

Instagram Stories do not need to be shot professionally. They vanish in 24 hours. They
humanize brands and forge a deeper connection between social audiences and brands.
Instagram Stories can also be a great way for brands to experiment with different kinds
of content and see what works before investing marketing dollars in that idea.

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 2. On Top of the Feed: When Instagram changed their algorithm a few months ago to
show posts in-feed depending on how likely were you to be interested, brands had no
choice but to work even harder to create compelling and engaging content. Instagram
Stories help brands be even more visible to their followers. If someone already follows
your brand, they will see it on top of their feed highlighted by a colored circle, which
indicates that a new story is available. This is a huge opportunity to get content right in
front of an audience that already cares about you, helping to keep your brand top-of-
mind and driving awareness.

Instagram and other social networks have a unique ability to impact prospective
customers and customers in various stages of the buyer’s journey, from awareness to
advocacy. Here are the stages of the buyer’s journey:

While Instagram Stories do not currently offer in-depth metrics, the feature is already
being used by top brands across many verticals. Here’s how brands are using Instagram
Stories to meet business goals for their brands and
products.

Starbucks

What: Fall has become synonymous with pumpkin patches

and Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice offerings. The retailer has, in
a very light-hearted way, captured both popular subjects in
this Instagram story.

Impact on Buyer’s Journey: Starbucks’ seasonal coffees

are so popular that they command their own social
media pages. As the retailer launched the fall-themed
coffees, this story was perfectly crafted to capture the fall
mood and at the same time announce the new products,
driving awareness.

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 Time Magazine

What: Time is using Instagram Stories to highlight global issues like the refugee crisis in
Greece. Powerful photos like these have a potential to be a great instrument for social
change, documenting people’s circumstances, sharing their stories, and changing their
lives–or at least sparking a dialogue.

Impact on Buyer’s Journey: Instagram Stories are shared with people who are already
aware of your brand and are following you on Instagram. This is an opportunity to
connect with your core audience on values they followed you for in the first place.
Time, which has been an impeccable source of world news for over nine decades, used
Instagram Stories to release a very strong and succinct story about the crisis in Greece,
directing the audience to more content on their website. While the story surely helps
drive top-of-mind awareness, it mainly impacts the consideration stage of the buyer’s
journey on the social media metrics map.

Social Metrics Map

SOCIAL MEDIA
BUYER’S JOURNEY OBJECTIVE SOCIAL ACTIVITY SOCIAL KPI’S BUSINESS IMPACT
STRATEGY

Create Expose target audience Posts, promotions

AWARENESS Impressions, reach SOV, ToMA
awareness to brand content (boosts)

Generate engagement
Generate of target audience with # of engagements,
CONSIDERATION Posts, responses Visitors/traffic (online or offline)
demand brand content types of engagements

Drive Drive target audience Conversions (purchases, lead sub

DECISION conversion to brand offers Posts, promotions Link clicks missions, app downloads)
-

Drive engagement with (positive) earned mentions,

Delight Responses (i.e. social
ADOPTION customer care metrics Sentiment and satisfaction
customers brand product/services customer care)
(responses, times, & qty)

Inspire Activate customer Posts, outreach to Earned impressions, Referrals, influencer activity
ADVOCACY evangelism influencers influencers, reshares earned reach, social UGC positive word of mouth, NPS

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 NASA

What: NASA shared an Instagram story inviting social media users from around the
world to register for a satellite launch event at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The
selected applicants would get exclusive behind-the-scenes access for the launch, plus
the opportunity to snap, post, tweet, and share everything about the launch of NOAA’s
GOES-R.

Impact on Buyer’s Journey: It is not every day that we get an opportunity to go behind-
the-scenes at a rocket launch. This post from NASA is immensely exciting for many
of NASA’s followers who are passionate about space exploration. Although the CTA
(driving traffic to site) for this story mainly impacts the consideration stage of the buyer’s
journey, the overall experience goes beyond just the registration on the website.
Being part of an event like a rocket launch inspires the audience to engage with NASA
further and makes them associate with the brand positively, helping drive adoption and
building advocacy.

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 AirBnB

What: AirBnB showcased an AirBnB room with an influencer, @SongofStyle, who visited
Paris for Fashion Week. In this story, she gives a quick glimpse of her room and the
neighborhood where she stayed.

Impact on Buyer’s Journey: This influencer takes AirBnB’s audience around the house
and out the window, and even on a trip to the neighborhood shop. This rich and
immersive experience is a great example of a brand activating influencers to become
advocates and inspire evangelism among current customers. Worth noting: there is no
CTA here, which keeps the content non-salesy and experiential.

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 The New York Times Fashion

What: NYT Fashion covered the Ralph Lauren Fashion Show at New York Fashion Week,
where the designer made dresses available for purchase immediately after the show. NYT
Fashion also shared celebrity interviews and moments from the after-party.

Impact on Buyer’s Journey: The fashion vertical is one of the most active on Instagram,
and understandably so, since images and videos are such an integral part of that
industry. This story gives the audience a glimpse into what happens at high-profile events
that most don’t get a chance to see firsthand. Such content helps delight the audience
and create a positive association with the brand, helping drive adoption.

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 Amazon
What: Amazon showcases a Chalkboard Mug in this story, showcasing how creative one
can get with it. The playfulness of this story keeps it memorable.

Impact on Buyer’s Journey: The ephemeral nature of this Instagram Story is a good fit for
the transient nature of the design on the chalkboard mug. For a retailer that sells millions
of products, it is not possible to create a story for each one of them. However, a simple
and fun story like this one helps build top-of-mind awareness about the retailer and also
helps drive people to Amazon’s website, where they can then discover many other items.

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 Whole Foods Market
What: Whole Foods used Instagram Stories to announce their sales/digital coupons,
which were valid only for a few days.

Impact on Buyer’s Journey: Instagram has been one of the most engaging channels
for Whole Foods. The brand experiments with different features to keep interactions
with their audience engaging. This story showcases sales and coupons, and also
features a CTA asking people to download the app for weekly deals. This is a brilliant
strategy to glide the audience through the decision stage in the buyer’s journey to
drive conversions, since everyone who shops at Whole Foods would love to be able
to use this information. Since the information in the story is only available for 24 hours,
downloading the app is a logical next step.

While Instagram Stories do not yet have metrics, the feature can undeniably be
leveraged to move your audience through the buyer’s journey.

August 2016: Instagram Zoom rolls out, addressing a common pain point and
allowing users to zoom on photos and videos in feed, on profiles, and on Explore.
There’s so much you can do with this much-requested feature, I’m surprised that more
brands aren’t leveraging it. Here are a few ways your brand can take advantage of this
“pinch and zoom” phenomenon.

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 Show Off the Details
Timberland asked its followers to “pinch and zoom,” and carefully inspect the unique
heel of a shoe from their autumn collection.

Use Instagram Zoom to generate interest for the unique craftsmanship and small details
of your new product or collection.

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 Map It Out
Northwestern University knows that its social demographic is active on Instagram, so the
famed Chicago school published an Instagram post of a campus map, taking advantage
of the new #pinchandzoom functionality.

Try this on your own brand’s Instagram account, especially if you are throwing an event
or running a campaign around a specific location or travel experience.

Instagram Zoom enables wide exploration of static images, so you should also consider
publishing infographics or portions of infographics on Instagram now, and encourage
people to explore different areas of the image with this feature.

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 Food Pics on Fleek
If you are a culinary-focused brand, Instagram Zoom should mean a lot to you. Refinery29
said it best on their Instagram account when the feature released in early September:

Give your followers a closer look at your food and bevs by asking them to zoom in. This
could also be a fun CTA for a contest campaign: can you find _____ on the table?

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 Make a Puzzle
Give your loyal followers an exclusive peek at what’s to come for your brand by hiding
clues in an Instagram picture.

Try it with your own brand: tease an update with a “Where’s Waldo” scene.

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 Read the Fine Print
Take advantage of Instagram Zoom by incorporating more text-heavy images in your
Instagram strategy. This will get followers to spend more time on your posts and give
them a deeper connection with your brand.

Just make sure you don’t abuse this strategy, and that you only use it when you have
something meaningful to say. Oversaturation of this technique will make followers scroll
past instead of staying awhile.

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 October 2016: Instagram Stories get added to the Explore feature, enabling greater
discovery of Instagram Stories and encouraging more users (especially brands and
influencers) to use Instagram Stories for discoverability.

November 2016: You can now add Boomerangs to stories, as well as mention other
users (who will be notified).

Instagram Live Is the New Instagram Stories

And not just because it is Instagram’s latest product feature. When Instagram Stories
rolled out, they took visual precedence over “normal Instagram,” organized in a neat
little row on the top of your screen–the first thing you see when you open the app. Now,
Instagram Live stories will be featured first in this Instagram Stories line-up.

What You Should Do: Want prime real estate on Instagram without investing more
in ads? Go Live! Take a look at your upcoming editorial and/or event calendar to see
where you can fit in regular Instagram Live updates that will engage your audience. Set
a view and viewer number goal, so you can see whether your strategy is working or
where you need to pivot.

Nota Bene: This strategy will only work if you do it on a regular basis. Unlike Facebook
Live, Instagram Live stories disappear once the broadcast is over.

Make Instagram Live Its Own Channel

Instagram Live takes a lot of features from Periscope and Facebook Live and weaves
them into its own ecosystem. Despite living in the same place, Instagram Live isn’t at all
like “normal” Instagram, so don’t treat it as such.

What You Should Do: Set the goals I mentioned in the previous section–or maybe even
more detailed engagement goals around comments and Likes (see the section below).
Don’t use Instagram Live only as a “behind-the-scenes” look at “normal Instagram”
photos and videos. That can work sometimes, but you’ll get the most return from
Instagram Live if you view it as its own universe, with its specific variation of your brand
feel and original programming.

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 Making the case for the resources you’ll need for this effort will require firm goals and
a clear explanation of how hitting these goals can affect your organization as a whole,
whether from demand gen, brand awareness, or revenue perspectives.

Choose Whether You Want Visible Comments

Instagram Live gives your audience the ability to comment and Like freely as the broadcast
goes along, but you also have the power to turn comments off altogether.

What You Should Do: Fear not the trolls. Open your brand up to feedback, and you may
be pleasantly surprised at what comes in. Use this feedback to inform future content, on
Instagram Live and beyond, and switch off those comments only if the water gets too hot.

Take Your Influencer Marketing Program Off Training Wheels

Instagram Live is a great place to do this. If your influencer marketing program is nascent,
dormant, or even non-existent, Instagram Live is a godsend.

What You Should Do: Reach out to influencers who intersect with your brand philosophy,
offering, and audience (or leverage the ones you already have!). Start a weekly series which
focuses on either interviewing relevant influencers in your space or letting an influencer
take over and invite your audience into their world.

This Is Brand Discovery at its Finest

Under the Explore tab, U.S. users will now find a “Top Live” section, displaying the “best”
Instagram Live content currently being offered, according to Instagram’s algorithm.

This is a wonderful example of quality winning out over quantity: while we recommend
regular, consistently timed and themed posting on Instagram Live, quality level is the most
important consideration to keep in mind. You’re opening yourself up to wide swaths of new
audience if you’re featured in the Top Live category.

What You Should Do: Make getting featured in the Top Live category a quarterly goal
for your Instagram Live program. Make sure you’re promoting your Instagram Live
programming on other social channels to draw more eyes and more engagement, which
are likely to get you featured here. Post outside or before your target audience’s business

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 hours, when Instagram users are more likely to be able to turn their full attention to a
piece of content (and have the sound on).

December 2016: Instagram introduces the Save feature on posts so you can check
them out later--a direct competitive swipe at Pinterest.

December 2016: Instagram Stories just got a lot more playful and creative with the
addition of stickers (including holiday-themed stickers to encourage adoption).

In the same update, Instagram rolled out a new “Hands-Free” option in the format picker
so you can start recording a video with just one tap.

You can now add as much text to your photo or video as you want, and choose between
left, center and right justified text, with a new slider that lets you adjust size easily with
automatic text wrap. On iOS, you can now save your entire story from the past 24 hours
to your camera roll as a single video (very similar to Snapchat’s download feature).

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 BASIC: INSTAGRAM DEFINITIONS AND METRICS
To understand any network, you need to know its parameters: what it does, which actions
users can take, and which metrics count toward your success. You can’t analyze what you
don’t know, so we’ll start by defining the different ways of measuring Instagram. Armed
with the proper metrics, you’re able to research, measure, and optimize your Instagram
programs.

Engagement Metrics
Likes
Likes on Instagram are much like Facebook Likes or Twitter Favorites. They are a signal
that the image you’ve posted has resonated with your followers. A user taps a photo or
video twice in the center to like it, and the heart icon beneath the post turns solid red.
Next to this icon is a count of how many Likes an image has earned.

Comments
Besides liking posts, users can also share comments. The comments appear under the
photo, with the option to collapse or expand when there are more than three. Users can
tag other Instagram users and include hashtags and emojis in their comments.

Total Engagement
Total engagement is the sum of Likes and comments on your Instagram posts during an
established time period.

Total engagement gives you insight into how active your audience is and how well your
strategy is working.

Engagement per Post

The engagement per post metric provides deeper insights than just total likes or
comments. It gives you an average of how much engagement you’re getting per post and
helps you discover which posts earn the most interaction. Keep in mind that some of your
posts will resonate well and earn high engagement numbers, while others will fall flat.

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 In addition, it’s important to look beyond average engagement per post number and take
a magnifying glass to your content. This can be done by breaking engagement per post
into engagement per video and engagement per photo to give you more tactical insight
on which types of content your audience responds to most.

Engagement as % of Followers
Engagement as a % of followers is calculated for a specific time period, and is an
invaluable tool for benchmarking.

Total Engagement in a Time Period ÷ Total Followers

=
Engagement as % of Followers

Engagement as a % of followers shows the portion of your current followers interacting

with your posts during a specified time period. By comparing this metric period-over-
period, marketers have a starting point to find valuable insight into their specific tactics.

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 Hashtag Engagement Metrics Potential Hashtag Reach
A secondary type of engagement on Instagram is interaction with your brand hashtag. Your potential reach shows you how many people have seen your hashtag on
An “engagement” with a hashtag happens anytime an Instagram user mentions a Instagram. For the most part, reach is considered a “potential” metric; just because a
hashtag in a comment or caption on any photo or video across the network. post appears on a feed doesn’t mean the target user has seen it.

Reach
The number of unique people who have seen
content associated with your page

Potential Hashtag Impressions

Your number of potential impressions is the amount of times that photos and videos using
your hashtag are displayed in a user’s stream. Just like reach, this is a “potential” metric.

Impressions
Hashtag Volume The number of times content associated with
Hashtag volume is the total number of hashtag mentions during an established period your page is displayed
of time. If you’re more interested in how viral a campaign hashtag is rather than how
your Instagram account is being interacted with, you’ll want to pay attention to hashtag
volume, the number of times a hashtag has been used in any given period.

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 Instagram Stories

The metrics available for Instagram Stories right now are limited. While this may change in
the future, right now we have three big metrics you should be paying attention to if you’re
investing time and effort in Instagram Stories.

View Count: The number of people who have watched your Instagram Story. Swipe
upwards while you watch your Story. You’ll see how many people have watched your
Story and their usernames listed below.

View Rate: Keeping an eye on your View Rate on a consistent basis allows you to
improve. How many of your followers are actually watching your Instagram Stories? Which
Instagram Stories have the best View Rates, and which have the worst? How can you
optimize by time of day or content?

Let’s say that your account has 100,000 followers. Your Story gets 1,000 views. Your View
Rate would be:

(Number of views X 100)/Number of followers

This gives you 1%. This is your View Rate for that Story.

EVERYONE
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HAS A STORY
 Drop-Off Rate: You can figure out the percentage of your followers who stopped
watching after 1, 2 or X Stories, as well. Let’s say your first Story had 3,000 views, the second
had 2,000 views, and the last one had 1,000 views.

First, determine the View Rate for each of your Stories.

Story 1: 3%
Story 2: 2%
Story 3: 1%

Then, calculate the difference between each percentage by using the following equation:
PRO TIP:
((Story 2-Story 1)/Story 1) X 100 Compile a list of your most frequent
By monitoring your average drop-off rate on a regular basis, you’ll be able to tell which
viewers, and put their names and
content is turning your followers off and which content is keeping their attention. key characteristics (i.e. geographical
location, profile interests, gender,
etc.) in a Google Doc or Excel
spreadsheet. Try to understand what
your most frequent watchers have
in common, and scour their profiles
to see the kind of content they post
(and, thus, might be interested in
seeing from your brand).

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 INTERMEDIATE: OPTIMIZING YOUR STRATEGY
Instagram

Experiment with segmented analysis.

“We want to know what’s working,” said pretty much every social media marketer ever. It
makes sense: when you analyze your social data, you’re able to quickly understand which
content is performing best.

On the whole, that’s fantastic, but today we’re here to take social analysis one step
further. We’re here to segment our data.

Segmented analysis allows you to bucket specific types of posts together and analyze
them as a group.

A simple form of segmented analysis is analyzing performance by post type: video,

photo, or link. Once you aggregate data for your segments, you can compare their
performance and understand trends in your content. This approach is an effective way
to learn which posts are driving engagement, impressions, or any other metric you’re
trying to move.

Here are a few different examples that can help you think about segmentation, so
you can craft a social strategy that really speaks to your audience. In these examples,
I focused on Instagram and created segments using Simply Measured’s segmented
analysis tool. I used our reports to investigate engagement per post and its components
(comments/likes), as well as the number of people tagged in comments.

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 Product vs. Product
One way to conduct segmented analysis is to compare how different product lines
drive engagement.

Segmentation
Take a look at the Chili’s Grill and Bar Instagram account and you’ll find a variety of posts
featuring their food, alcoholic beverages, and, of course, desserts. We looked at all
posts that were published by Chili’s on Instagram in Q1, comparing all posts including
an image of a drink with all posts including a dessert.

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 Results
Instagram posts featuring desserts were a hit with Chili’s audience. All six of the posts
featured the restaurant’s Molten Chocolate Cake, and their average engagement was over
50% higher than the average engagement on posts featuring drinks.

Take a look at the lead chart on Simply Measured’s Instagram Account Report and you’ll
notice that the top post featuring drinks also includes this cake.

There were over twice as many comments on the dessert posts, and these comments
included many more tagged Instagram accounts.

It’s interesting that the brand published three times more posts with drinks than desserts.

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 Blog Strategy
You can use segmented analysis on Instagram to evaluate a specific tactic.

Segmentation
KitchenAid often posts teasers and encourages followers to go to their blog. In Q1 of
2016, 44% of KitchenAid’s posts used this approach.

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 I wanted to know if this was an effective strategy, so I created a segment targeting all Results
of KitchenAid’s posts that contained the word “blog.” I compared these posts with all Since Instagram posts don’t have links, it makes sense that posts that mentioned the
Instagram posts from the brand. KitchenAid blog didn’t perform as well as KitchenAid’s average posts in Q1.

These were the top two Instagram posts containing a blog mention in Q1 2016. These were the top two Instagram posts containing a blog mention in Q1 2016.

There was less engagement on blog-related posts across the board. Additionally,
Ready to try Simply Measured? the two top-performing posts featuring the blog had an incentive for the audience
to win. To contrast, the top two posts overall were shots of KitchenAid stand mixers.
The lesson here: KitchenAid can do more with less and shouldn’t use Instagram as a
Request a Demo Today driver towards its blog.

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 Link in Profile Approach Breville used this tactic quite a bit in Q1 2016. Close to 30% of their posts mentioned
Do “link in profile” posts work for your brand on Instagram? Segmented analysis is a link in their profile. We compared the performance of these posts to averages for
one way to find out. all posts published during the time period.

Results
Once again, this segment performed below average for engagement across both
photos and videos.

Engagement by post type on Facebook from the Facebook Fan Page Report.

It’s interesting to note that Breville’s posts with photos also outperformed posts with
links on Facebook. This suggests that even when users can click on a link right from a
post, they aren’t engaging as much with posts that only contain links.

These quick case studies demonstrate how powerful segmented analysis can be for
understanding what’s working for your brand on Instagram and across social.
Segmentation
Another tactic that marketers use to move their audience to their site is putting a
specific clickable link in their profile and including a call to action in their post.

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 Partner with and Regram Influencers: Understand What Engages Your Target Audience the Most. In line
Brands like Red Bull do a great job of partnering with influencers who matter to their with the point above, you must understand what captures your target audience’s
target demographic, and regramming photos from the most influential extreme attention (and keeps it there) to be successful on Instagram. Let’s take The New York
sports photographers, including Christian Pondella. This is a great way to source Times, for example.
awesome content and amplify the brand’s Instagram feed.
The Times already reaches millions of people through print and digital
subscriptions. To reach and engage their audience on Instagram, the brand
experiments with various formats: photos, videos, and Instagram Stories. Their
engagement as a % of followers in the data period between 10/23/16-12/23/16 was
over 175% (the top five fashion brands that we studied last week average 60.6%
engagement as a % of followers), indicating that this community is highly engaged
with the brand on Instagram, and brand content is resonating.

Looking at the broad content types posted by The Times, we see that posts related
to Travel generate the most engagement and are among the top 5 content types
posted by the brand. Posts related to the 2016 Election were the second most-
engaging and most common post type sent out by The New York Times.

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 The following post from this year’s election was the most engaging post in the Employ a sophisticated hashtag strategy.
data period. Emirates Airline uses two hashtags – #HelloTomorrow and #EmiratesAirline. Only
#EmiratesAirline was used for this report, since we tracked only branded hashtags
for all the airlines.

Emirates has consistently been ranked among the top airlines in the world. They
were the second airline (after Singapore Airlines) to fly the world’s largest passenger
airliner, the Airbus A380, which is a much-discussed topic among frequent flyers and
aviation geeks. Emirates understands that, and has made sure to tag this energetic
chunk of the audience so that they find the content easily through other relevant
hashtags that the airline used in the photo’s comments.

The brand’s engaging tone and beautiful images resonate with customers. Its
strategy to use the hashtag in the photo, along with other popular hashtags, ensures
that this content will reach the right audience, making it the most engaging post for
the brand in the data period and driving the peak on Aug 19th.

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 While Emirates Airline has not used any influencers directly to generate engagement
on Instagram, the airline has used its partnership with the LA Dodgers to very
creatively drive conversations. They have painted one of their planes in the Dodgers
colors, and shared a video taken by an avid aviation enthusiast, SpeedbirdHD.

This brand nails a few important elements of Instagram marketing in one post,
partnering with/mentoring influencers, posting a video, and sharing
user-generated content.

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 Instagram Stories This feature gives your brand an unprecedented ability to get organic content in
front of users, as more and more social networks become pay-to-play enterprises.
Tell a cohesive story, and create suspense. Your drop-off rate will be high
if you are not telling a story which makes people want to keep watching in the midst This feature also means that your account gets unique placement among an
of all their other distractions. Instagram user’s closest friends and family members, so make sure you’re not
abusing the feature by flooding feeds with low-quality content, or you’ll experience
Stay competitive. What’s your competition doing? Don’t copy, but get a significant amount of unfollows. Remember, with great power comes great
inspired. responsibility.

Find out when your followers are online. Instagram Stories are not reliant Gain more insight about your audience. Instagram stories have flexible
on an algorithm, unlike “regular” Instagram. This gives you a unique opportunity to privacy settings, meaning you can exclude specific people from seeing your
get quality content in front of those who care enough about your band to follow you. Instagram stories, even if they follow you. Chances are, this privacy feature is not one
But first you need to know when your followers are on Instagram, which requires most Instagram users will target at brands. This means that the more Instagram users
running an analysis of your Instagram followers. Side note: we can help with this. your brand follows, the more you will be able to view Instagram stories and gain
personal insight into how your target audience utilizes Instagram and interacts with
Use the text and drawing tools, and stickers. You can now get more fellow Instagram users.
playful with your content without having to leave the Instagram platform, if you
already have a presence there. If you aren’t active on Instagram yet or have an Repurpose content. Instagram stories are flexible, meaning you can choose
account but don’t post much, this feature opens an avenue for creating a unique, to feature a part of your Instagram story on your main profile if it goes over well. This
fresh experience on the network. gives you the chance to test content before you make it a part of your Instagram
magnum opus.
You will also be able to “dress up” basic content that would look pretty bland on its
own, and generate more engagement. This is an excellent method of connecting
with a younger audience on the Instagram platform that you haven’t been able to
touch yet.

Don’t abuse ‘em. If an Instagram user follows your brand, your account will
show up with a colorful ring around it whenever you release new Instagram story
content. This means it is time to aggressively increase your follower count, so that
you can be top-of-feed and top-of-mind on as many user feeds as possible.

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 ADVANCED: DRIVING BUSINESS VALUE

Find Your Next Instagram Campaign Theme

Decide on your next Instagram campaign topic and content by looking at the
conversations and trending themes around your brand and/or industry.

This is an example of the volume, Share of Voice, and sentiment information you can receive
about any topic you choose within the Simply Measured Social Listening solution.

Our Social Listening solution provides greater context for planning your next campaign with:

• Themes that can expose purchase intent and preferences for product “flavors”
• Keywords that can tell you which terms people are associating with your brand
• Sentiment Analysis that can tell you whether the commentary around your brand is
skewing positive or negative right now
• Regional and Geographic Trends so you can better reach your target audiences and
new consumers and get involved in relevant conversations

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 All of these features can help you expose insights around your brand faster than ever This will help you answer questions about your Instagram content in context,
before–then plan your next campaign accordingly. questions like: “Which content is being engaged with most, on Instagram and
beyond?” and “Does the same content work for me on Instagram as on insert other
social channel here?” and “How well are my influencer programs performing for me?”

Run Competitive Analysis

To refine and improve your social strategy, you should be continuously benchmarking
against competitors and running competitive analysis. This allows you to quickly
understand how your competitors are operating–where they’re winning, where they’re
weak–while also identifying and remedying gaps in your own plan.

Measure the Performance of Your Brand’s Content

You can use our Social Analysis & Monitoring solution to speedily measure the results
of your owned content, including a holistic understanding of your social performance
across all major social channels, and unified metrics for comparison across channels.

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 Drive Engagement and Brand Awareness Identify and Measure the Success of Your Influencer Campaigns
Want to know which of your posts are increasing social engagement and brand Influencer marketing is a growing, effective strategy on social for both B2B and B2C
awareness for your brand right now? Versus last week? Versus last month? Versus brands. Whether you want to leverage influencers with 1,000 followers or 1 million
last year? Versus last campaign? Versus last event? Now you can set concrete goals followers, the best way to find the right influencer fit for your audience is to look for
and benchmarks, and easily measure your progress–then optimize your content people who are already respected and engaged with in your space, reach out, and
accordingly. then measure the social yield they generate for you.

Our Social Analysis & Monitoring solution also enables you to easily drill down into
peaks and valleys and immediately see which owned posts drove those moments of
grandeur or frailty, so that you can begin to see trends and make the changes you
Optimize Towards Business Outcomes
need to when it comes to:
You need to be able to accurately attribute the impact of social on site activity and
• Social channel focus conversions, as well as put dollar signs next to social posts so you can report and
• Content type optimize based on business outcome. This includes, for the first time ever with Simply
• Copy Measured, Dark Social.
• Partnerships
• Overall messaging

This speed and flexibility will make you better and more agile at growing
engagement and awareness for your brand.

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 You can assign ROI, business value, and revenue to:

Impressions:

Simply Measured’s solution can show you the complete attribution picture when it
comes to social in your business. The easiest way to break it down is by Owned and
Earned. Let’s start with Owned.

Conversions: Email signups, coupon downloads, complete purchases, and

video views.

By first examining the ROI of your owned Instagram content -- the posts your brand
produces on social -- you’ll be able to understand the business impact of levers you
are totally in control of pulling in one direction or another.

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 Individual posts: understand social traffic and conversions to different domains associated with your
brand, different time periods, different social channels (including Dark), different
media types, different copy, and different hashtags.

You can even decipher how posts containing specific words or hashtags are
performing. For instance, you can see here how posts containing the word “Maui”
are driving value to an imagined business called Seattle Surfwear (as you might
guess, we had a hard time getting real customers to let us use their sensitive financial
information in a guide!).

Individual social channels:

In fact, you may find out that what you thought was your most lucrative channel
drives engagement but not the conversions and goal completions that actually
matter to your business–or vice versa. Only setting up a solid attribution program
will tell you. This is a powerful example of what you can do with a solution built specifically
for social attribution. You can’t do this type of content analysis using a tool like
Identify Which Content Drives the Most Engagement and Conversion Google Analytics.

It’s not enough to show high-level business impact. You must empower yourself on
a day-to-day basis by using powerful, flexible, and fast filters and search features to

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 This part of Social Attribution makes it incredibly easy for you to see how both
campaigns and individual pieces of content are performing against one another in
real time, so you can identify successes and make tweaks when necessary.

But let’s not forget about earned social. Social Attribution allows you to see how
consumer-to-consumer sharing is driving business outcomes for your business. The
Social Activity Funnel and line graph allow you to determine the impact of earned and
Dark Social.

Extract More Insight Into How People Find Your Brand’s Website
We can see that Dark Social is playing a significant role in the outcomes from earned
social sharing. Let’s delve deeper into that.

Determine Which Digital Advertising Channels Yield the Highest

Conversion Rates Since the Social Attribution solution is a fast-moving web dashboard, you can easily
One of the most powerful aspects of our social attribution solution is the ability to see isolate Dark Social and see how it is driving visitors to your website.
what content from your website is being shared through social. Here you can see what
web content is being shared and leading to site activity and goal completions.

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 When you scroll down, you’re able to see which exact domains are being shared via What we are seeing for Seattle Surfwear is that Dark Social is not a consistent driver
Dark Social for any given time period you choose. of pageviews. This can be the case for Dark Social because private messages often
contain specific pages consumers want their friends, family, and colleagues to
view. In fact, in many cases the URL being shared through Dark Social contains the
opportunity to convert right on that web page. So, let’s see how content shared via
Dark Social is generating business value, despite not being a driver of pageviews.

Let’s take a look at the level of pageviews that Seattle Surfwear is generating from
Dark Social.

For Seattle Surfwear, more traffic from Dark Social leads to increased Business
Value (the monetary value ascribed by your brand to non-purchase conversions).
This means that the private URL-sharing among friends, family, and colleagues is
consistently leading to Business Value for Seattle Surfwear.

When you tap into what is being shared through Dark Social, you have an entirely
new layer of intelligence on which to optimize owned content.

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 The person sharing via Dark Social has already done the digging for the link,
viewed the page, and decided to share it with those closest to him or her via private
message. This means that Dark Social sharing hits further down in the funnel, in the
consideration phase as opposed to the awareness phase.

Now that you know that Dark Social sharing is leading to a lot of revenue, you want
Determine Social ROI
to identify which URLs are being shared through Dark Social, so that you can better
Your job is to know the ROI of all the investments you are making, and then
educate your content strategy for social and the rest of your team. The products,
appropriately assign budgets to each digital channel for maximum ROI. Now you
messages, and promotions on these pages shared through Dark Social are exactly
have access to the revenue that social is creating from owned social accounts that
what will compel your audience to convert through your owned social posts and
your brand runs and manages:
web content.

All the insight you’ll glean from consistently running this type of analysis will give you
new power in your organization and allow you to leverage consumer sharing to drive
more highly qualified site traffic and conversions.

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 From earned social (how people talk about your brand and share your brand content): A customer searches for your product.

She clicks on a search result and heads to your product page or landing page.

And, for the first time ever, from Dark Social (the sharing of your content that occurs
via text, Slack, Facebook Messenger, and other messaging apps):

Accurately Represent Social Marketing and Your Customer Journey

Do you know how consumers interact with your digital content and, ultimately,
making purchases in a holistic way? Have you been missing Dark Social?

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 She knows that her friend has been searching for a product like this, so she texts her friend
the link (which Simply Measured has attached JavaScript to).

Her friend clicks on that link, visits your site, and makes the purchase or completes the goal
you have set.

Can you see this trajectory at present? If not, you’re not missing the complete
picture of your customer journey from Instagram to your website--and countless potential
opportunities to grow new revenue and make your content more appealing and shareable.
CONCLUSION
Now you have a well-rounded understanding of basic
Instagram metrics, along with some tried-and-true tactics to
deploy in your upcoming campaigns. Whether you’re looking
to harness already existing buzz around your brand or you
need to build awareness and drive conversions from the
ground up, be sure to turn to this resource whenever you find
yourself needing some more Inspiration.

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 About Simply Measured
Simply Measured is the most complete social analytics solution, empowering
marketers with unmatched access to their social data to more clearly define
their social strategy and to optimize their tactics for maximum impact.

Our goal is to put the tools to understand business data in the hands of
business users. We think reporting should be simple, attractive, and accessible
for everyone – not just data scientists. Our software streamlines the process
from data to deliverables and eliminates the countless hours spent on
everyday reporting tasks. We do this by putting cloud data sources at your
fingertips, providing a marketplace of best practice reports, and allowing you
to generate beautiful solutions on the web, in Excel, and in PowerPoint with
a couple of clicks.

Want to try Simply Measured?

REQUEST A DEMO

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