How To Create A Custom Instagram Report for Your Clients

We all know that social media isn’t just about creative campaigns and eye-catching visuals. Creating an Instagram report can be a painstaking process, but necessary in order to understand what your audience expects from you.

Not to mention that a great report is a one-way street to your clients’ hearts.

But out of all the social media platforms, Instagram seems to be drawing in the most engagement, according to Socialinsider’s competitive benchmark data. We’ve teamed up with them to find out how to get the best custom Instagram report for your clients and save time doing it.

Socialinsider looked into the top players in 21 of the main industries, and the results highlight Instagram’s supremacy when it comes to engagement, compared to Facebook and Twitter. 

This kind of information is where the true power of reports lie. And in this context, your Instagram data could not be more important.

What is an Instagram Report and How Can it Help Your Business?

A Comprehensive Instagram report give you a peek behind the curtains when it comes to your Instagram account. It’s a marketing success report that gives you all of the numbers you need to adjust the marketing strategies of your brand by breaking down the Engagement, Reach, Interactions and many other metrics.

This kind of report is your (and your client’s) key to finding out what the audience wants and expects from you: 

• Which campaign is more interesting
• Which campaign was unsuccessful
• What type of messages are more appreciated: emotional or product oriented
• What communities and micro-communities should you create around your brand
• Do people prefer images, carousels, or videos
• At what time of the day can you reach more people
• Which are the hashtags that help your message
• How many hashtags should you use

All of these answers are given through actionable insights meant to increase your brand’s social media success.

Benefits of a Comprehensive Report That Includes Competitive Benchmarks

Using Instagram to get insights into your audience’s behavior can help both agencies and brands optimize their campaign strategies, both online and offline. 

To take things one step forward in understanding the do’s and don’ts on Instagram, it’s essential to see where you stand compared to your main competitors. 

This is the beauty of Socialinsider: it also provides you with a comprehensive competitive benchmark analysis. This opens the door for a full view of the landscape in which brands operate – which should always be included in a comprehensive Instagram report.

Simply put, the more information you get, the easier it becomes to create successful campaigns.

Custom Client Reports Lead to More Effective Campaigns

Whether you decide on generating an Instagram report monthly, quarterly, or annually, or even a one-off report, it’s important to feel the pulse of your communication efforts in order to create a well-rounded strategy for your next actions.

But while all brands want high engagement, reach, and interactions, not all of them have the same KPIs.

As a social media agency, it’s important to anticipate your client’s needs for future ad campaigns, by highlighting the exact data that is of most interest for them and their marketing plans. 

For example, a brand might need to know how successful a certain campaign has been compared to other campaigns, while another brand is more focus on the micro-community formed around a certain hashtag. In these cases, generating a full report with waves of information isn’t the best course of action.

Make sure you know the purpose of each report, in order to include only relevant information.

What You Need to Know Before Creating a Report With Your Instagram Account Activity

With specific tools, you can extract presentation-ready reports, with built-in graphics that highlight your data, and catch your client’s eyes immediately. However, you still need to know what exactly you want to highlight.

A plan is always a great starting point.

Define the Instagram KPIs

Do you need a one-off report for a particular campaign?  Do you want to see if your follower count is higher? Or do you just want to see if your performance has increased compared to last year?

Choose specific, measurable, and relevant KPIs that are time limited.

Choose Which Metrics to Track

Quality over quantity. Make sure that the metrics you choose to track provide valuable information and drive growth. Metrics regarding audience, engagement, conversions, and type of content, will always show you how your next Instagram actions should look.

In other words, actionable insights will always be more valuable.

Keep Track of the Changes in Instagram

All social media platforms go through constant changes. Just because a certain strategy worked yesterday, doesn’t mean it will also be effective today.  You need to always be aware of the latest best practice tips and include them in your reports.

Use the Numbers For Your Future Strategies

All of the data and stats create a strategic story. For instance, information regarding your hashtags can tell you how many hashtags to use in your posts and what could be the most engaging combination.

In the example below, BMW uses on average four or five hashtags, with the #m4 being present in the posts with the most engagement.

See How Your Clients Rank Against Top Competitors on Instagram

You may think your strategies are working, but the only way to fully understand whether you offer the best services to your clients is to see how the data stacks up against the main competitors. Analyze what is and isn’t working, and plan your next steps accordingly.

Build A Plan

All data, including the not-so-flattering stats, is an asset. In your Instagram report you should include a plan for improvement based on the findings, and your clients will know they’re in good and capable hands.

What Kinds of Data Does an Instagram Report Contain?

Socialinsider likes to include a wide range of metrics that tell a brand’s story. Apart from the data that you can usually find in Instagram Analytics, they also include any other metrics of value. 

The aim is to also help you save time, by generating presentation-ready reports, as well as give you quick access to every stat you may need for a well-rounded performance report.

You can download a main report, with the most important data, but also a report of your Insta Stories or a competitive report.

Typically, this is what’s included in the main report.

Start with a profile summary of all the key metrics.

This includes:

• Total number of posts
• Total number of followers
• Followers’ evolution: followers’ count and growth 
• Total engagement 
• Total engagement per post
• Average engagement rate per post and the increase or decrease of this engagement rate
• Average engagement rate per profile and the increase or decrease of this engagement rate

Followed by an insight into the top performing posts.

Other information that can be added is about your posting behavior, as well as content performance. This information can help you determine whether you’re posting too much or too little, whether you’ve chosen the right time of day for your Instagram posts, or whether you should be posting more images, videos, or carousels.

Of course, a more detailed view about the page’s engagement also has to be included, detailing the distribution of comments and likes per day, and per type of post.

One SocialInsider’s most requested features has been the hashtag analysis section, which can help determine which hashtags are more likely to bring more engagement, as well as how many hashtags should you use in your posts.

Dig Through the Data: What Are the Most Important Instagram Metrics?

To save some time, you have the option to download it.

Typically, the information we include in your main report should highlight:

• Engagement
• Reach
• Stories Retention Rates
• Traffic and Sales
• Audience Demographics

How Can You Generate An Instagram Report With Socialinsider?

You can download a presentation-ready report, directly from your dashboard for your general stats, your posts, or your stories, or download a side-by-side analysis of your brand and one of its main competitors.

Caption: Generating a presentation-ready report.

Hacks For Your Instagram Report – Final Tips And Tricks

1. Create a plan and set KPIs before starting to work on your report.
2. Instead of creating one big report that includes a vast amount of data, try making a few smaller reports, centered around specific goals.
3. Track the most important metrics for your report
4. If time is of the essence, turn to professional tools to quickly generate the reports
5. Make custom reports for each client to better meet their needs
6. Include side by side visuals to highlight the data and the differences in results
7. Draw clear conclusions and use your findings to put together a new plan of action.