How Instagram Insights will Change the Future of Influencer Marketing
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We’re excited to announce we’ve integrated Instagram Insights into the Shopping Links platform, which means you’ll now get an in-depth cross section of an influencer’s demographics, reach, impressions and engagement metrics at a glance.
So how will Instagram Insights make collaborations even easier? With authentic followers and quality engagement at the forefront of everybody’s mind this year, Instagram Insights gives you a transparent look at an influencer’s true reach and the types of followers they have.
Instead of throwing money at an influencer that looks good, Instagram Insights provide an in-depth snapshot of how successful your campaign could be before engaging an influencer.
This is what influencers see when they look at their Instagram Insights: This data is now available on our Blogger Profiles
What’s Instagram Insights?
Individual insights have been available to influencers since 2016, but Instagram has only recently released these insights to select businesses. Shopping Links is one of these businesses, meaning brands on our platform can now see the social audience of an influencer before they commit to working with them.
Instagram Insights pulls data from an influencer’s Instagram feed to tell a story about the type of followers they have and how many of their followers they are reaching. From the best times to post, to their audience demographics and locations, Insights provide a previously unattainable transparency of data and analytics. Most importantly, they measure influencer conversion metrics – these include the actual reach and impressions of the content over the last seven days, and the detailed results of any branded content they share.
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A new way to track conversion
Measuring conversions from online marketing has always been easy. Less straightforward was measuring conversion from social media: in this regard, brands had to rely on far more guesswork.
With Instagram Insights, we are now at a point where we can track conversion from social campaigns with clarity and accuracy. Think of it as Google Analytics for social content: where once you may have relied on Analytics to determine conversion, now Instagram Insights is your yardstick for measuring the return on investment of your campaign.
After many years of tracking and monitoring conversion from web traffic, the needle is now rapidly shifting: with the ability to track sales from social, we are seeing this channel overtake web traffic in terms of conversion, particularly in the influencer space.
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Instagram Insights can now be found on the Shopping Links Blogger Profiles
How can I make insights work for me?
Instagram Insights is a must-have tool to measure the return of an influencer campaign and optimise your influencer marketing efforts.
So how can you use Instagram Insights to ensure you see a greater return on investment? The answer lies in utilising its valuable data.
Data is the foundation of any successful influencer campaign. It gives you an inside look into your audience: how they do things, what they like, who they are and where they’re from.
With Insights data, brands can see the social audience of an influencer to a precise degree, meaning you can fine-tune your campaigns to find the perfect influencer and audience fit.
If Instagram Insights show that a blogger’s followers are primarily based in the US, consider how your messaging and products will appeal to that audience: while it may be summer in Australia, swimwear won’t be top of mind for audiences in the depths of a New York winter. Likewise, if Insights tell you an influencer’s audience is primarily female, that should give you a good indication that gifted menswear products may not drive the conversion you're looking for.
Use these insights to understand the audience you’re trying to reach, then tailor your campaigns accordingly.
Insights also help you measure the impact of the influencer campaigns you’ve currently got underway. By looking at the impact your marketing is having across different channels, you can see if there’s something you need to do differently – whether that’s posting at a certain time, or trying a different content format – and double-down on the things you can see are working.
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Results of your Instagram posts can now also be found on the Shopping Links Collaboration Results page
Case Studies
Insights has already helped the Shopping Links team find the best influencers to connect with brands. Take, for example, one influencer we were going to engage in a collaboration: on the surface, she looked like the perfect fit. She had the right content and aesthetic, 50,000 followers, and an engaged audience.
In the past, we would have proceeded with this influencer based on her type of images, her engagement level – the things we could see on the surface.
With Insights now available, we were able to see a more complete picture. What we now saw was that half of these 50,000 followers were male, a demographic that weren’t likely to convert with female-focused fashion items. Many were also based in South America, which was not the target location for this campaign.
Now with insights we were able to shift that budget to someone who did have the right audience – since then, we've seen amazing results.
Want to secure influencers for your own brand? Get $100 off your first Product Seeding collab. Click to get started.
Another example is when we were gifting influencers for an Australian market and found that despite the influencer being located in Australia, most of their social following was in the US. Having access to these insights once again showed that gifting this blogger would not have yielded any immediate conversions or return for this particular brand.
These granular influencer insights were something brands could only speculate about in the past: their only option was requesting an influencer send screenshots of their insights page. Having access to this data is an industry-first that not only holds influencers accountable to the authenticity of their audience, but also means brands no longer have an excuse for an under-performing ROI.
Having access to this data should have an immediate impact on your influencer strategy, and increase your return on investment in future campaigns.
Want to get access to the Instagram Insights of the bloggers in our network? Request an intro today and we’ll run you through how Shopping Links can help you hit your influencer marketing goals.
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