Most marketers know by now that Instagram is a great opportunity waiting to be taken advantage of. The platform now has over 300 million monthly active users, 49% of whom use the app every day.

What’s more, a study by Forrester found that Instagram posts achieved a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21% – that’s 120x more engagement per follower than Twitter and 58 times more than Facebook – so it’s no surprise that 42% of marketers are planning to increase their use of Instagram in 2015.

Tracking mentions of your brand on Instagram is the first step towards an effective social strategy for the platform – it allows you not only to understand the language, images and context in which your brand is mentioned on the site, but also allows opportunity to engage with your audience and track customer feedback.

We’ve been providing Instagram coverage for some time now, but we’ve just upped our game by now allowing you to authenticate Brandwatch with your Instagram account for even better coverage, alongside the other coverage improvements we’ve announced this week.

How it works

It’s very simple. You authenticate Brandwatch with any Instagram account (whether a personal or company one) in order to get an ‘access token’ that then allows us to crawl Instagram more often – resulting in more consistent, improved coverage.

Our initial tests have shown volumes for common hashtags increase 3x on average (and sometimes even up to 5x!) so you should see an improvement in the volume of Instagram data you see within Brandwatch Analytics, especially if you’re tracking popular terms.

Instagram mentions are then collected and displayed in the same way as any other type of mention within the platform, for you to further chart, analyze and enjoy.

It’s really simple to do – just click on ‘Login with Instagram’ in the header bar under your username, sign in to Instagram and you’re done! Of course we won’t meddle with your Instagram account at all, we’re just using the authentication to get the access token.

What’s more, there are no restrictions to you on tracking Instagram – no keywords you can’t track, no limit on the number of Instagram-inclusive Queries (within your usual subscription limits) and no restriction on using all of the wonderfully useful Query operators you’re used to using to get super refined, relevant data.

Once you authenticate, your standard Queries will automatically start receiving improved Instagram coverage and everything will act as normal – all of your key terms, operators etc will still apply. If you want to set up Instagram-only Queries, tracking key terms or hashtags (using the hashtags: operator), you can use site:instagram.com in your Query and only collect Instagram data.

Plus, in our next phase of development we’ll be working on adding more metadata, including geolocation, to Instagram mentions so you can get even more value from them.

Top tip

If you want to only view Instagram data within your dashboards you can either:

  • Add site:Instagram.com to your Query, so you don’t pick up any mentions from other sites
  • Make a Site List that just includes Instagram and add that as a filter to individual components or your whole dashboard to filter out non Instagram data
  • Filter by the ‘Image’ page type if you want to see data from both Instagram and other visual sites such as Flickr

If you’re a Brandwatch customer and need help with Instagram authentication, please read the Help Center or get in touch with our support team.

If you’re not already a customer and want to benefit from the endless possibilities that analysing Instagram data (as well as millions more data sources) brings, then why not get in touch with us for a free demo.