Instagram is a powerful ally in your social media marketing strategy. It's the third-most-popular social media platform by user numbers, just behind Facebook and YouTube and ahead of WhatsApp and TikTok.
Brands have been using Instagram to communicate with their customers, engage their target audience, and promote products for years now. Like any marketing campaign, it can be easy for results to drop off over time.
If you feel like your content isn't getting the reach or engagement it used to, or if you feel like you're not hitting the marks on your social media strategy the way you expect, then it's probably time for an Instagram audit.
What is an Instagram audit?
An Instagram audit is a comprehensive analysis of your company's Instagram channel. It ensures that your profile bio and landing page are up to date and relevant. It also assesses the quality of your content and even your follower list.
The overall goal of an Instagram audit is to assess how well your account is meeting your marketing goals and identify gaps.
Most marketers understand the need for consistent improvement and adaptation, but it can be hard to know exactly what to change and how or when. An Instagram audit gives you the baseline information and data you need to make decisions about your channel.
11 essential steps for an effective Instagram audit
Every good decision starts with information gathering and intelligence. By reviewing every aspect of your Instagram presence, you'll be able to make meaningful decisions that will help you meet your objectives.
These 11 steps will generate actionable insights you can use to reenergize and optimize your Instagram marketing strategy.
1. Analyze your profile and bio
Your Instagram bio is the best way for your target audience to quickly understand your brand and what it stands for. It also communicates key information about your business and should be 100% accurate.
This might seem obvious, but a surprising number of high-profile brands have inaccurate information in their profiles. Things change over time, and it might be years since you created your company bio. It might even have been created by a predecessor.
Step one of any Instagram profile audit is to check your username and profile name. These are two separate fields: your username is your Instagram handle, and your profile name is your company name. The good news is that both of these fields are used in Instagram searches, so only one needs to be your full name.
Make sure your username and brand name meet your corporate guidelines and match your brand voice. If you used an abbreviation or special punctuation to create your username, now is a good time to review that.
While you're auditing your own username, now is also a good time to check for fake accounts and spoof accounts using some variation of your company name.
After the username, check your company bio. Your bio is important for social media search engine optimization (SEO). Social media SEO makes you easier to find. Your bio should include as much relevant information about your company and what you do as possible. Include your industry, your brand mission, and details about key products and services.
Then, make sure that the brand logo is current, and that the logo image and cover image match your corporate visual identity.
Lastly, check out your highlights, call-to-action buttons (CTA buttons), and links are all up to date and relevant. It's a good practice to update these items regularly to keep your profile page fresh. Set a quarterly or annual reminder to review your bio.
2. Check content type, quality, and relevance
As a visual platform, Instagram audiences respond to high-quality, engaging, and relevant content. Trends shift over time. At the moment, short-form reels and stories drive the majority of Instagram traffic and engagement.
Make sure you have a good spread of content types on your page to maximize results. An Instagram audit should also look at how well your content aligns with your business goals.
Serve content that offers value by assessing your top-performing posts and your audience demographics to see what they're looking for. Original, meaningful content that fits your brand values will always perform better than empty content that only chases trends or simply advertises your product.
Low-resolution images and videos that don't fit the platform look unprofessional and turn off audiences. Make sure your images and videos are optimized for Instagram, with the correct aspect ratios and image resolution.
3. Evaluate post engagement
Engagement rates are a key performance indicator (KPI) for your Instagram account.
You'll get quantifiable insights into the quality and relevance of your Instagram content by assessing key Instagram engagement metrics over time. These include:
- Impressions
- Comments
- Saves
- Shares
- Likes/reactions
Brandwatch social media analytics tools give you quick access to these metrics in a convenient and easy-to-use dashboard so you can track the performance of your content over time.
Track which of your posts have the most engagement, and try to emulate that success in other posts. If you see a drop-off in engagement, that could be a sign that your strategy has grown stale and needs an update.
4. Audit follower quality
There's a lot of value in a high follower count. Lots of followers mean higher potential reach and give you a better opportunity to engage with more people in your target market. That value falls off quickly, though, if those followers are bots or irrelevant to your brand.
Use Instagram tools to assess your follower demographics, evict bots and fake accounts from your follower list, and get a sense of who your followers are.
5. Examine hashtag strategy
Instagram hashtag research can help you identify high-performing, relevant hashtags for your target audience. Adding these hashtags helps with searchability and increases your likely reach. That's because hashtags are the way Instagram groups and categorizes content.
The right mix of hashtags can help drive brand awareness and bring in more followers. Hashtag trends are always changing, which is why it's important to use Instagram hashtag tools to analyze and gather a list of tags to use in your Instagram captions.
6. Analyze posting frequency and timing
Most social media marketing managers understand that frequent and regular posts are key to consistent engagement, but the timing of those posts can have a big impact on your reach. The best time to post on Instagram is usually during the middle of office hours — between 10 am and 3 pm on weekdays.
Review your top-performing posts and what times of the day or days of the week they were posted to audit what times work best for your audience.
Use social media scheduling tools to make it easier to post consistently. These tools have a double benefit in that they encourage and facilitate better collaboration among your team members.
7. Review Instagram Stories and Highlights
Stories are hugely popular among Instagram users, largely because Meta, Instagram's parent company, prioritizes short-form content in its algorithms. The downside of Stories is that they disappear after 24 hours — and that's where Highlights come in. Highlights let you save Stories and curate them in playlists.
The best use cases of Highlights are when brands package product information, campaign assets, or other relevant content in one Highlight. This lets users scan through your Stories even after they've expired. If you use high-engagement Story prompts like quizzes or polls, Highlights give you a way to capture and maintain the engagement from those Stories for longer.
Audit your Highlights to make sure you've captured the content you want to capture, that it's organized well, and that all your Highlight content is relevant and up to date.
8. Assess video content
Take a look at your Reels. You can use native Instagram analytics to see which Instagram Reels got the most views and use other social media analytics tools to analyze metrics like repeat views, completion rate, and engagement rate.
Using your marketing goals, build a checklist that helps you assess how each video fits into your overall Instagram strategy. Does the tone align with your brand's voice? Is the content useful? Do you have too much of one type of content and not enough of another?
Keep in mind, Instagram users respond best to high-quality, engaging videos that provide value.
9. Audit your Instagram captions
Your captions may also limit the reach of your content if they are off-tone, lack the right hashtags, or contain errors and grammatical mistakes. Captions help users identify the purpose of your video, and it's important they match your brand voice and image.
Hashtags make your posts more findable to a wider, non-follower audience, but using the wrong hashtags can make it less likely your content is served in your target audiences' For You page (FYP).
When reviewing your captions, qualitative analysis can be valuable. For example, if you notice that many of your low-performing posts have short captions without hashtags, it may indicate the need for better-quality captions that include well-chosen hashtags.
10. Monitor competitor activity
Your competitor's social media accounts are a great place to get ideas and track trends from within your industry. If they've recently had strong success with one or multiple posts, that's a good sign that your target market engages with that content.
Make a list of things your competitors are doing that you're not. That could include influencer marketing partnerships, giveaways, how-to videos, aesthetic Reels, or even hashtag challenges. Keep a close eye on your competitors to help identify emerging trends and high-engagement content.
It can also be difficult to understand what a good impression or engagement rate for your posts can be without context. Brandwatch Benchmark is a competitive analysis tool that monitors other social media accounts to give you valuable insights into where your marketing strategy fits. This information lets you identify areas of growth and strength.
11. Measure results and set goals
Qualitative and quantitative data go hand-in-hand on social media. Set a benchmark for your own content by tracking your key Instagram metrics over time.
The first step is to set goals. Goals might include:
- Increase follower numbers by X by [date]
- Increase impressions by X over [time period]
- Increase engagement by X of interactions per post
These goals will be influenced by the changes you decide to make during your Instagram audit.
It's a good practice to make one change at a time and assess the performance before making other changes. If you make too many changes at once, you can lose sight of which changes made the most impact. Have a clear sense of what changes you want or expect to see, and then create reports to measure those key metrics.
Best Instagram audit tools
Third-party Instagram analytics tools make it easy to set up dashboards with customizable reports that track your performance on the social media platform. Each of the tools helps you audit your Instagram account and offers important insights into your performance.
Brandwatch
We've already mentioned some of the powerful Instagram audit features found in the Brandwatch Social Media Management suite of tools above. Brandwatch is a comprehensive media and marketing management system that offers everything from influencer marketing tools to social media analytics and more.
Brandwatch uses proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) software to track and predict Instagram trends. It can also use this software to offer suggestions for improvements and changes to your Instagram account.
Social media managers use Brandwatch Measure to build reliable, easy-to-use reports on key performance metrics over time, helping you see what's working and what isn't as you evolve and update your Instagram campaigns.
Brandwatch is a comprehensive social media tool that covers everything from advertising to influencer campaigns, analytics to hashtag tracking, and more. Also, Brandwatch allows users to build a suite of tools according to their needs, so you get an efficient and effective social media management system that suits your business needs.
Its accurate insights, powerful AI, detailed analytics, and convenient scheduling tools make Brandwatch a one-stop partner for any digital marketing campaign.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media scheduling tool that includes Instagram analytics and reporting in its suite of solutions. Hootsuite lets you collaborate with colleagues and external partners to run and manage Instagram posts on multiple channels.
It's best known for its easy-to-use content calendar features and its ability to manage both paid and organic content.
Hootsuite integrates with most major social media platforms, so you only have to visit one page to manage your accounts and campaigns across multiple sites.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another Instagram account audit tool that uses powerful analytics reports to help you benchmark your success. Sprout Social lets users measure their own Instagram account analytics and overlay that data with competitor data in a simple reporting dashboard.
Sprout Social started as a social media scheduling and collaboration tool, making it particularly useful for auditing your Instagram content mix to better align it with your content goals.
Iconosquare
Iconosquare provides tools to measure and monitor social media performance indicators like engagement metrics and impressions.
It also lets you generate custom reports that you can save in image formats to share with your team during your Instagram audit process.
Like the other tools listed here, Iconosquare also offers key insights into similar accounts and performance. Iconosquare's best feature is its tool for tracking the performance of Instagram Stories.
Social Blade
Social Blade is a simplified social media tracking tool that uses historical data on engagement rates, follower growth, impressions, and account activity to benchmark your social media performance. It also offers projections based on trends in this data, so you can see likely future growth patterns for your brand's account and your competitors.
This program is designed for users who need quick, easy snapshots rather than robust, real-time data.
Boost your social marketing with an Instagram audit
A comprehensive audit of your Instagram account is the best way to optimize your Instagram performance and revitalize your account. The keys to a successful audit include:
- A list of well-defined business goals you want to achieve
- An Instagram audit checklist of items to assess
- A plan for tracking results
- The right tools to help you conduct the audit and measure its impact
The best tools offer insights into various aspects of your social media marketing strategy using tools that audit influencers, audience quality, content quality, and your performance versus other relevant accounts.
Armed with the insights from your Instagram audit, you'll be in a position to grow your account, improve your performance, and accelerate your digital marketing campaigns.
FAQs
Why should I perform an Instagram audit?
An Instagram audit helps improve the performance of your Instagram marketing campaigns, making them more efficient and driving better results. Audits highlight how many followers are engaging with your content and how successful you are at attracting audiences from outside your Instagram followers list.
You can think of an Instagram audit as a chance to reset and relaunch your account to your target audience and boost your online visibility.
How often should I conduct an Instagram audit?
Regular Instagram audits will keep your account fresh and relevant for longer. A quarterly Instagram audit will allow you to make meaningful adjustments to your campaigns, while also providing a long enough time period to measure the impact of those changes. Most social media marketing managers recommend at least an annual audit to keep your Instagram account up to date and relevant.
What are the key areas to focus on during an Instagram audit?
First and foremost, your Instagram audit should be aligned with your company goals. That might be brand awareness, product awareness, driving sales, or improving your corporate image. Then, it should focus on the following aspects:
- Profile and bio accuracy and relevance
- Content quality
- Content mix
- Content performance
- Hashtag performance
- Competitor performance and benchmarking
Use these analytics tools to help identify gaps in your content strategy so you can fine-tune your campaigns.
How can I check the quality of my followers?
Perform an Instagram follower audit to find fake Instagram followers. Mass followers audit tools will identify bots on your follower list. It's important to remove fake followers because they lower your engagement rate and the overall health of your account. This can impact how often Instagram recommends your posts or profile to other users, which reduces your potential reach.
A free Instagram audit tool native to the platform lets you search for potential spam followers and remove them. Just tap your follower list, then tap "Potential spam" or "Flagged for your review" to get a list of fake followers.
What metrics should I track in an Instagram audit?
An Instagram audit should cover your engagement rates and impressions, as well as growth over time. The rate of reactions to your content can help assess how much it resonates with your customers, while shares help show how useful or interesting your audience finds your content. The exact metrics you want to track will depend on your marketing goals and objectives.
Some common high-level metrics include:
- Engagement rate: the measure of how many users react to, comment on, share, or save your posts versus how many see it
- Impressions: the measure of how many people see your content
- Follower growth: how many new followers you gain over time
From there, you can dive deeper into insights like how many of your impressions come from followers versus non-followers, which hashtags lead to the most impressions, and more.
It's important to review these metrics regularly to get a sense of your growth potential and determine how well you're meeting your goals.
