10 Free Tools to Help You Understand Your Social Media Audience

We often recommend crafting your social media posts according to your audience.

But how you know who the individuals that make up your social media audience are? And how do you know what content they like?

Answering these two questions is essential if you’re looking to execute a successful social media strategy. And often, you’ll find the answers by turning to data and social media analytics.

In this post, I’ll share a few ways of using data to find out more about your social media audience across the major social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

How to learn more about your social media audience on the major social media platforms

Here’s an overview of the tools that you can use to help you understand who your followers are. Feel free to click on any of the social media platforms to skip to its section.

Facebook: Audience Insights, Page Insights, and graph search

Instagram: Instagram Insights and SocialRank

Twitter: Twitter analytics, Followerwonk, and SocialRank

LinkedIn: Linkedin analytics

Pinterest: Pinterest analytics

Facebook

Audience Insights – Demographics, Page Likes, and more

The most powerful tool to help you understand your Facebook Page fans is hidden within the Facebook Ads Manager: Audience Insights.

Here’s how to access your Audience Insights:

1. Click on the dropdown menu in the upper-right corner of any Facebook page
2. Select “Manage Ads”
3. Click on the “Facebook Ads” menu
4. Select “Audience Insights” (you might have to hover over “All Tools”)

Or you could access it via this direct link: https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights.

Once you’re at your Audience Insights, select “People connected to your Page and enter your Page name under Connections > Pages.

Facebook might have, by default, selected “All United States” under “Location”. If you want a global view of your Facebook Page fans, hover over “All United States” and click on the cross.

Now, let’s find out who your Facebook Pages fans are!

Under the “Demographics” tab, you can get the following information:

• Age and gender distribution
• Lifestyle
• Relationship status
• Education level
• Job title

Under the “Page Likes” tab, you can get the following information:

• Top categories that your fans might like
• Pages that your fans might like

Under the “Locations” tab, you can get the following information:

• Top cities
• Top countries
• Top languages

Here’s the other information you can dig into:

• Activity – as in Facebook activities and their device usage
• Household – as in household size, income, etc.
• Purchase – as in purchase behavior

Household and purchase information is only available for audiences in the US currently.

You can get a good understanding of your Facebook fans from all this information. For example, here’s what I found about Buffer’s Facebook Page fans:

• In terms of age, the biggest group (45 percent) is people between 25 to 34.
• We have slightly more male (57 percent) than female fans (43 percent).
• Most of them work in “Management”, “Sales”, “Arts, Entertainment, Sports, and Media”.
• They also like software and internet companies like Hootsuite, MailChimp, and Social Media Examiner.
• In terms of location, the biggest group is people in the US (31 percent), followed by people in the UK (9 percent).

What did you find about your Facebook fans?

Page Insights – When your fans are online

Besides knowing your Facebook fans’ demographics, interests, and locations, you can also find out when they are using Facebook in a typical week and day.

In your Page Insights, under the “Post” tab, you have a section called “When Your Fans Are Online”. (It should like the screenshot above.)

Under the section, “Days”, you’ll see how many of your fans are active on Facebook on a given day. Under the section, “Times”, you’ll see how many of your fans are active on Facebook during each hour on a typical day. This is a great way to find your best times to post.

Most of our fans seem to be on Facebook every day of the week. On a typical day, they tend to be most active between 12 pm and 9 pm EDT. How about your fans?

Graph Search – Other Pages that your fans Like

While Audience Insights tells you the Pages your fans might like, Facebook’s Graph Search can tell you the Pages they have Liked.

To do this, type “pages like by people who like (your Page name)” on the search bar at the top of any Facebook page.

In the results, there’ll be a section, “Pages liked by people who like (your Page name)”. As the section title suggests, those are the Pages like by your Facebook Page fans. One thing to note is that the results seem to prioritize your friends. So essentially, these are Pages liked by your friends who also Liked your Facebook Page.

So what do you know about your Facebook Page fans now?

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Instagram

Instagram Insights – Demographics, location, and more

With a business profile on Instagram, the best way to learn about your followers is through Instagram Insights — Instagram’s free native analytics. (If you don’t have a business profile and want to convert, here’s how. If you don’t want to convert, read the next section.)

Here’s how to access your followers’ information in Instagram Insights:

1. Tap on your profile photo in the lower-right corner of the mobile app
2. Tap on the analytics button (the chart icon)
3. Scroll down to the “Followers” section and tap on “See more”

Here’s the information about your Instagram followers that you can get from your Instagram Insights:

• Gender distribution
• Age range distribution (men and women)
• Top locations (cities and countries)
• Times and days when your followers are most active

Tip: If you tap on the bar charts for age range and location, the percentages will be revealed.

Our Instagram followers are quite similar to our Facebook Page fans.

• We have slightly more male (52 percent) than female followers (48 percent).
• In terms of age, the biggest group (45 percent) is people between 25 to 34.
• In terms of location, the biggest group is people in the US (38 percent), followed by people in the UK (8 percent).
• They are most active on Tuesday and Wednesday on a typical week and between 9 am and 6 pm for most days.

How does this compare to your Instagram followers?

The follower information in Instagram Insights doesn’t tell you your followers’ interests. A way to figure this out is to look at your top posts. In the third step above, instead of tapping on “See more” in the “Followers” section, tap on “See more” in the “Posts” section.

Here, you’ll find your top posts by impressions – the total number of times that each post has been seen. I would recommend filtering your top posts by engagement, instead, to find out which types of posts your followers like to engage with. To change the filter, tap on “Impressions” at the top and select “Engagement”.

Sometimes, it might not be immediately obvious which type of posts your followers like. In such cases, you could make hypotheses, test a few types of posts, and see what works.

Social Rank – Interests, activity, and more

If you don’t have a business profile on Instagram or prefer not to convert, you could use free Instagram tools like Social Rank.

Once you have connected your Instagram account to Social Rank, click on “Show Summary” in the top-center of the page. Here, Social Rank will show you the many different information about your followers, such as the following:

• Gender distribution
• Top followers locations
• Popular bio words
• Popular hashtags
• Popular time to post
• Followers distribution (how many followers your audience has)

The information under “Popular bio words” and “Popular hashtags” might reveal the interests, job title, or industry of your Instagram followers. For example, our Instagram followers like to use words like “marketing”, “social”, and “media” in their bio, which is what our ideal audience does — social media marketing.

The “Popular time to post” section shows you the times your followers are posting, which is when they are online and when it might be best for you to post.

You could also make some inferences about your followers by looking at your most engaged followers. To do that, sort your followers by “Most Engaged”. Social Rank will show you the followers that have interacted with you the most in the past 45 days. Click on the top 20 to 30 profiles and check out their bio and websites. Are there any similarities?

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Twitter

Twitter analytics – Interests, demographics, and more

The native Twitter analytics provides comprehensive information about your Twitter audiences — your followers, your organic audience, and your tailored audiences.

Here’s how to access this information:

1. Click on your profile photo in the upper-right corner of any Twitter page
2. Select “Analytics”
3. Click on “Audiences” in the top navigation bar

Here are some of the key information you can get from the various tabs (e.g. “Overview”, “Demographics”, etc.):

• Interests
• Gender and age distribution
• Country
• Occupation
• Household income categories
• Consumer buying styles

Here’s what I found about Buffer’s Twitter followers (again, they are quite similar to our Facebook fans and Instagram followers):

• We have slightly more male (56 percent) than female followers (44 percent).
• In terms of age, the biggest group (54 percent) is people between 25 to 34.
• In terms of location, the biggest group is people in the US (36 percent), followed by people in the UK (12 percent).
• They are mostly interested in “Business and news”, “Technology, and “Tech News”.

What about your Twitter followers?

Followerwonk – Job title, activity, and more

Followerwonk is a great Twitter tool that provides a bit more information than Twitter analytics. And it’s free for analysis of accounts with up to 25,000 followers.

To analyze your Twitter follower base, type in your Twitter handle and select “analyze their followers”.

Here are some of the useful information about your followers that you can get:

• Locations
• Most active hours
• Word cloud of their bios
• Gender

Tip: Followerwonk integrates with Buffer so that you can easily create a schedule based on when your Twitter followers are most active.

Social Rank – Interests, activity, and more

Social Rank can also be used for Twitter, and it provides similar information as it would for Instagram.

For example, here are the popular words and hashtags used in our Twitter followers’ bio and posts respectively (they are similar to those of our Instagram followers):

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LinkedIn

LinkedIn analytics – Job titles, locations, and more

The LinkedIn Company Page analytics provides a good amount of information to help you define your LinkedIn followers (and visitors).

Here’s how to access your LinkedIn follower information:

1. Click on “Manage Page” on your Company Page
2. Click on “Analytics” on the top navigation bar
3. Select “Followers”

The LinkedIn analytics offers seven types of demographic data about your followers:

• Country
• Region
• Job function
• Seniority
• Industry
• Company size
• Employment status

I find it helpful to look at the job function and industry data to get a sense of who our followers are. From our data, it seems that most of our LinkedIn followers are marketers and founders in the digital space.

You can find similar information about your visitors — people who aren’t following your Company Page and have visited your Company Page. Instead of selecting “Followers” in the dropdown menu, select “Visitors”.

What does your data tell you about your LinkedIn followers and visitors?

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Pinterest

Pinterest analytics – Demographics, interests, and more

If you have a business account on Pinterest, the best way to understand who your Pinterest followers are is to use Pinterest analytics. (You can set up your Pinterest business account here.)

Here’s how to access your follower information in Pinterest analytics:

1. Click on “Analytics” in the upper-left corner of any Pinterest page
2. Select “People you reach”
3. On the right side of the page, click on “All audiences”
4. Switch to “Your followers”

Or you could access it via this direct link: https://analytics.pinterest.com/audience/.

Here’s the various helpful information you can get:

• Audience size
• Country and metro
• Language
• Gender
• Interests
• Boards (Boards by your followers with many of your Pins)
• Brands (Businesses your followers follows and engage with)

Our Pinterest follower base is slightly different from our follower base on the other major social media platforms. Perhaps because of the demographics on Pinterest.

• We have more female (74 percent) than male fans (21 percent). 5 percent unspecified.
• In terms of location, the biggest group is people in the US, followed by people in India.
• They are mostly interested in “Technology”, “Design”, and “Travel”.

How does your Pinterest follower base look like?

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What do you know about your social media audience?

Understanding who your social media audience is can help you craft the right content for them, boost your engagement, and increase your reach. And by using the amazing social media tools around, you can learn so much about your followers — for free.

Once you have analyzed your social media following, I would love to hear what you have found out. Who is your social media audience? What are their interests? What do they do?

Also, do you know of any other analytics tools for understanding one’s social media following? It’ll be great if you are up for sharing.

P.s. If you found this post helpful, you might like our guide to optimizing your social media content — helping you decide what to post on each social media platform.

Topic: Social media strategy

Image credit: Unsplash

Thank you, Natasza Libich, for asking this question in our Buffer Slack community. 

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-audience

The Silent Rise of LinkedIn to 500M Members: What Marketers Need to Know for 2018 [SSM069]

What if I told you that LinkedIn, a social media platform that is now 14 years old, is the next big opportunity for marketers and brands?

While much of the focus over the last few years has been on perfecting our Facebook and Instagram marketing strategies, LinkedIn has been silently growing their user base to more than 500 million users.

The reason for this sudden growth?

LinkedIn is no longer known only for their résumé and job searching capabilities. It’s evolving into a thriving network of incredible content, influencers, and networking opportunities unmatched by other social media platforms.

In episode #69 of The Science of Social Media, we explore the many features that make LinkedIn such a powerful platform for brands and what marketers need to know going into 2018.

Let’s dive in!

How to listen: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS

The silent rise of LinkedIn: What marketers need to know

The LinkedIn journey to 500M members

If you were to ask me to describe LinkedIn in 2015, I might have said something along the lines of, “a great professional network” or “the perfect place to find a job.” Now, as we close out 2017, it’s clear that LinkedIn is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the world of B2C and B2B marketing.

Microsoft must have seen something in the rising star as well – officially acquiring LinkedIn for $26.2 billion at the end of 2016 in one of the largest social media deals in history.

A quick look at LinkedIn’s journey to 500 million members:

• 2003 (0 members): Launch
• 2005 (1.6M members): Introduction of Jobs & Subscriptions
• 2006 (4.2M members): Launch of public profiles for members
• 2009 (33M members): Jeff Weiner joins LinkedIn as president
• 2011 (140M members): LinkedIn goes public
• 2013 (250M members): 10th anniversary of LinkedIn
• 2015 (330M members): $1.5B acquisition of Lynda.com. Launch of Pulse
• 2016 (400M members): Microsoft acquires LinkedIn for $26.2B
• 2017 (500M members): 100,000 new articles published weekly

What’s most astonishing is how fast LinkedIn has grown over the last six years. Between 2011 and 2017, LinkedIn’s user base grew from 140 million to 500 million – shattering the growth rate in previous periods.

LinkedIn demographics

One of the more intriguing aspects of LinkedIn is the demographics of their users.

• Twenty-nine percent of online adults use LinkedIn
• Fifty-six percent of users are male and 44 percent are female
• Fifty-one percent of users have a college degree
• Thirteen percent of millennials (15 to 34-year-olds) use LinkedIn
• Forty-four percent of users earn more than $75,000 a year
• Forty-one percent of millionaires use LinkedIn
• The average CEO has 930 connections
• Statistical Analysis and Data Mining are the top skills on LinkedIn

CEO Jeff Weiner plans to “develop the world’s first economic graph” with the hopes of “digitally mapping out the global economy.” A goal not far from reach seeing how LinkedIn has an in-depth dataset of company, industry, and individual contact information for more than 500 million members.

In the long-term, this will be a game-changer for marketers and brands in the B2B space.

Becoming a content-first platform

Written content

Did you know that LinkedIn Pulse started as the Pulse app – a class project at Stanford University in 2010? It wasn’t until 2015 that LinkedIn fully integrated Pulse into the platform and established themselves as a content-first social media network.

Before Pulse, LinkedIn didn’t offer users or influencers much in the form of organic content. When they announced that they’d be opening up their Pulse publishing platform to the public in February 2014, it opened the floodgates to a world of content.

Today, Pulse no longer operates as a separate application within LinkedIn. It’s seamlessly integrated into members’ feeds as articles to help enhance the content-first experience.

It’s working, too! More than 100,000 organic articles are published weekly on LinkedIn, many of which are written by top-level executives at brands around the world. Startup Founder, Gretta van Riel, explains just how powerful LinkedIn has been for her content:

Video content

On August 22, 2017, LinkedIn launched what might be their biggest update since Pulse – native LinkedIn video.

Just a few months after launch, the evidence seems to be pointing towards videos performing extremely well on LinkedIn. Videos from the limited release are getting shared 20+ times more than any other content. Our team has been hearing the same sentiment from marketers everywhere.

We also had the wonderful opportunity to speak with the LinkedIn team at MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum this year. LinkedIn plans to roll out the native video feature to brands and businesses in the near future — an update that we’re all excited for!

Our teammate, Paul Thomson, has been experimenting with native LinkedIn video with great success.

Several of his videos are performing two to three times better on LinkedIn than they are on other social media platforms. A great sign for LinkedIn as a video publishing platform.

Becoming a platform for influencers

An interesting trend that we’ve been keeping a close eye on is LinkedIn’s development of their invite-only Influencer Program.

As Daniel Roth, Editor in Chief at LinkedIn writes, “LinkedIn’s Influencers — an invite-only group of some of the top minds in business — have access to briefings, data, and experts that the rest of us can only dream about.”

Offering Influencers an exclusive platform to publish content was a brilliant move on the part of LinkedIn. One, because it offers Influencers a guaranteed way to get their content in front of hundreds of thousands of members. Two, because naturally, Influencers will bring their own audience to the LinkedIn platform by simply sharing their content with their followers. And three, it bolsters LinkedIn’s reputation as a thought-leader in multiple sectors.

The Influencers so far include Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Sallie Krawcheck, James Altucher, and more.

In fact, 36 percent of LinkedIn members now read interesting articles they find in their feed, an increase of 20 percent since 2014. Activating influencers to write great content gives LinkedIn a unique advantage over other social media networks.

Becoming a platform for personal branding & networking

Personal branding

Ultimately, LinkedIn’s biggest value proposition and its reason for growth lie in the ability for members to develop a strong personal brand.

• Seventy-nine percent of professionals say that networking is valuable for career growth
• Sixty-one percent of professionals say that regular online interactions with networks can lead to job opportunities

But what does this mean for B2C and B2B companies?

When brands have employees that feel empowered to build a brand and start side projects outside of their traditional work, it’s a win-win for both the individual and the brand.

Having creative hobbies has been shown to make people more helpful, collaborative, and creative in their job performance.

Networking

I can’t tell you how many relationships I’ve made by simply reaching out to someone on LinkedIn and saying hello.

Many of the guests we’ve featured on The Science of Social Media were first introduced to us via a private LinkedIn message.

Whenever I have a question about social media or marketing, one of the first places I turn to is LinkedIn.

Check out this incredible infographic put together by the folks over at Number Sleuth showing just how important LinkedIn has become for personal brand and networking:

Where we go from here

We predict that 2018 will be an amazing year for LinkedIn – both as a social media platform and a marketing channel for brands and businesses.

It’s a fast-growing network with exciting features being released regularly. These features will continue to open up lots of great opportunities for marketers to connect with highly-targeted audiences in new and engaging ways.

Keep an eye on the growth of written and video content as well as an increased focus on activating influencers by brands within their community.

It’s a great time to be on LinkedIn!

More awesome resources from the show

• The Rise of the New LinkedIn [Infographic] – SocialMediaToday
• Harnessing the Power of LinkedIn to Monetize and Grow Your Business – Buffer Blog
• Once a Running Joke, LinkedIn Is Suddenly a Hot Social Network. Here’s What Changed – AdWeek
• Microsoft officially closes its $26.2B acquisition of LinkedIn – TechCrunch
• Applying to Be a LinkedIn Influencer – LinkedIn
• LinkedIn opens video uploads to all as part of a bigger video push – TechCrunch
• How to Publish on LinkedIn Pulse: A Beginner’s Guide – HubSpot

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Hailley on Twitter
• Brian on Twitter

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

—

About the show

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 10,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

—

Image credit: Unsplash, TechCrunch

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/the-silent-rise-of-linkedin

I Read More Than 20 Instagram Studies so You Don’t Have to. Here’s What I Found.

At Buffer, we’re big fans of using data and research to guide our social media strategy. So when it came to finding the best Instagram strategy, I turned to social media studies.

I read through more than 20 studies on Instagram marketing from companies like Facebook, Simply Measured, and News Whip. Some analyzed the top Instagram accounts while some even studied tens to hundreds of thousands of Instagram posts.

Here’s what I learned from my look at the research.

8 Actionable Instagram Marketing Tips, Backed by 20+ Studies

The studies contain a ton of great information, and I distilled the key findings into eight actionable tips. Here are the eight tips to guide your Instagram strategy:

1. Instagram’s young audience likes current, creative, and useful content
2. Posting frequency is not as important as posting consistency
3. There isn’t a universal best time to post on Instagram
4. Businesses cannot ignore Instagram Stories
5. Using both hashtags and location tag drives the most engagement
6. Videos might overtake images as the most engaging type of content
7. User-generated content drives growth and conversions
8. Caption length doesn’t affect engagement

1. Instagram’s young audience likes current, creative, and useful content

According to Statista, an online market research portal, the largest user group on Instagram in the U.S. as of December 2016 was the 25 to 34-year-olds, which accounted for 25.2 percent of U.S. Instagram users. This is followed by the 18 to 24-year-olds, which form 20.6 percent of U.S. Instagram users.

Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan American think tank, also looked into the demographics of Instagram users in the U.S. They also found that “Instagram use is especially high among younger adults” — to a greater extent than Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Here are some highlights from Pew Research Center’s study on social media use in the U.S.:

• Fifty-five percent of online adults between the age of 18 and 29 use Instagram — the highest percentage among all age groups
• Thirty-three percent of online adults between the age of 30 and 49 use Instagram — the second highest percentage among the age groups
• A bigger percentage of women (38 percent) than men (26 percent) use Instagram

Instagram strategy takeaway:

If your target audience is between the age of 18 and 49, Instagram could be a great platform to reach your potential customers and engage your existing customers.

To help with your Instagram marketing strategy, Facebook interviewed and surveyed more than 12,000 teens and young adults and offered these recommendations on how to maximize Instagram’s potential for your business:

• Showcase what makes you special: If you can share a perspective that only you can offer, you can more likely connect with the teens and young adults on Instagram.
• Blend in to stand out: Instagram users prefer beautiful visual content and often post such high-quality content themselves. To engage them, you have to create similar high-quality images and videos.
• Inspire the moment: Teens and young adults in the study describe Instagram as current (42 percent), creative (37 percent), and useful (32 percent). Hence, they would expect such content from brands on Instagram.

2. Posting frequency is not as important as posting consistency

A common question we get is:

“How often should I be posting on Instagram?”

We previously found that major brands post once or twice per day to Instagram. And some post as many as 10 times per day without seeing a significant fall in engagement.

Tailwind, a visual marketing tool, analyzed more than 100,000 Instagram posts and offered a plausible explanation for the high posting frequency:

The more often you post on Instagram, the more likes and followers you gain.

They found that accounts posting more than seven times per week get more likes and grow their following faster than accounts that post less than seven posts per week.

Tailwind also analyzed the engagement rates of accounts that increased their posting frequency. They found that when accounts posted more frequently, their engagement rate went up.

Union Metrics, which studied 55 brands on Instagram, also found a similar pattern.

We’ve monitored accounts that post once an hour, all day long, and they see above-average engagement rates on almost all their content, no matter when it occurs in the one-post-an-hour sequence. Later posts do not decline in engagement.

But this doesn’t mean you should start posting several times per day. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. Union Metrics’ whitepaper mentioned two important points:

1. Your audience might not be used to seeing several posts per day from you
2. You might not have the time to create so much content and maintain your content quality

Instagram strategy takeaway:

Posting more frequently is great if your audience likes to see multiple posts per day from you and if you have the resources to constantly produce high-quality posts. Otherwise, posting consistently is more important.

If your followers are not used to seeing many posts per day from you, you could annoy them and cause them to stop following you. If you do not have a team working on your Instagram account, it’s likely challenging to consistently put out high-quality content several times a day. When you run out of content ideas and stop posting consistently, you risk losing followers, which Union Metrics discovered in their study.

Like Union Metrics suggested in their whitepaper, “Stick to a regular posting schedule, but generally don’t post more than a few times a day. One or two great posts a day is better than 10 mediocre posts.”

Buffer for Instagram can help you post consistently to Instagram and measure your Instagram marketing efforts. We would love for you to give it a try and see the difference.

 

3. There isn’t a universal best time to post on Instagram

CoSchedule did a great job rounding up several studies on the best times to post on Instagram. Here are some of the studies and their findings:

• Huffington Post: 2 am to 5 pm is the best time to post on Instagram
• MarketingProfs: 1 to 2 pm is best for engagement
• CoSchedule: Tuesday 2 pm could be the best time for driving traffic

Lifewire also looked at a few research and found several best times to post on Instagram. SumAll also compiled findings from a few sources (Visual.ly, Search Engine Watch, and Social Media Today) and suggested this: 5 to 6 pm on weekdays and 8 pm on Mondays with a sweet spot at 6 pm.

All the suggestions likely worked well for some businesses but certainly not all. This variety in “best” posting times points me to one conclusion.

There isn’t a universal best time to post on Instagram.

Instagram strategy takeaway:

If there isn’t a universal best time to post on Instagram, when should you post on Instagram? How do you make sense of these research?

Here’s my take: These research are great for you to form hypotheses of your best posting time. For example, like Lifewire suggested, “Around the lunch hour is when people get a break to do what they want; that often includes checking social media.” What you could do is to test posting around the lunch hour and outside of the lunch hour. Which posts did better?

You can also use tools like Iconosquare and Buffer to help you find your best time to post on Instagram by using your own Instagram data. Here’s how Iconosquare’s best time to post feature looks like:

4. Businesses cannot ignore Instagram Stories

Here are two interesting Instagram Stories statistics reported on Techcrunch:

• Instagram Stories generated, on average, 35 percent more views for brands than Snapchat Stories, according to the mobile video platform, dubdub.
• One in five Instagram Stories posted by businesses receives a direct message reply.

When Iconosquare wanted to study the effect of Instagram Stories on the engagement of Instagram posts, they asked more than 1,200 Instagram users, “Since the arrival of Stories, what do you spend most of your time on Instagram doing?”. They found that “in only 3 weeks, almost one-quarter of the Instagram users we surveyed have seemingly ditched their usual Instagram activity in favour of watching Stories.”

The shift in attention led to a fall in engagement on Instagram posts. When Iconosquare looked at the engagement rate of 60 top brands before and after Instagram Stories was launched, they discovered that engagement rate fell after Instagram Stories was launched. This finding was confirmed by several readers of the Iconosquare blog.

Instagram strategy takeaway:

A way to counter the drop in engagement rate is to follow the change in the behavior of Instagram users: to post Instagram Stories.

Klear, an influencer marketing platform, studied 149 top brands in eight industries to see how they have been using Instagram Stories. They found that 45 percent of the brands in their study are using Instagram Stories at least once per week. Some of the most active brands on Instagram Stories include McDonald’s, IBM, and Forever 21.

If you are not sure what to post in your Instagram Stories, Klear provided a breakdown of the ways brands in different industries have been using Instagram Stories:

For example, posting merchandise promotions was the most-common use of Instagram Stories in the fashion industry. I think it’s safe to assume that brands would post more of what’s working for them so the most-common use of Instagram Stories is likely also the best use of Instagram Stories for that industry.

Here are 10 free easy-to-edit Instagram Stories templates to help you get started.

5. Using both hashtags and location tag drives the most engagement

Unlike other social media platforms like Facebook, hashtags are a norm on Instagram. When studying the Instagram accounts of the top 100 global brands in 2014, Simply Measured found that 88 percent of their posts include at least one hashtag.

There’s a good reason for this. Using hashtags and location tag helps people discover your Instagram posts.

In the same study, Simply Measured found that posts with at least one hashtag generated an average of 13 percent more engagement while posts with a location tag received an average of 29 percent more engagement. This was confirmed by their 2015 study where they found that posts with hashtags and a location tag received the highest average engagement.

Instagram strategy takeaway:

If you want to increase your Instagram reach and engagement, use hashtags and location tag if possible.

After studying more than 65,000 social media posts, TrackMaven found that nine hashtags seem to be the optimal amount for getting the maximum engagement.

But you want to be mindful of not overusing hashtags. According to Iconosquare, overusing hashtags can lead to a shadowban on your posts where your posts don’t show up under the hashtags they’ve used. This will reduce the discoverability and reach of your posts and, in turn, reduce the engagement level.

6. Videos might overtake images as the best content type

On Facebook, it’s clear that videos have overtaken images as the best content type. But on Instagram, it’s still unclear.

According to studies by News Whip, L2, and Simply Measured, the average engagement of images are still higher than the average engagement of videos.

While it might seem that images are still the best content type on Instagram, there are some observations by News Whip that suggest videos might become the best content type soon.

• Top publishers, on average, get more likes on their images but more comments on their videos. (L2 found a similar trend.)
• The average engagement on videos is growing faster than the average engagement on images (53 percent increase vs 46 percent increase).
• Top publishers are posting more videos than before — up to 93 percent of their monthly posts.

Instagram strategy takeaway:

Whether videos will outperform images on Instagram will depend on each brand’s followers. The best you can do is to experiment with videos and compare their performance with your image posts. Your data will tell you which content type your followers like more.

When News Whip studied the top 20 publishers that post the most engaging Instagram videos, they found that the average video length is 30 seconds. This can be a great starting point when you are creating your videos. Here are the other tips that News Whip shared:

1. Use relatable or pop culture memes relevant to your audience
2. Show your viewers something they wouldn’t see every day
3. Capture action-packed feats, stunts, or sports
4. Offer inside peeks to celebrities or athletes
5. Play around with appetizing collages or animations
6. Focus on heartwarming stories

If you plan to create more videos, here are a few tools to help you.

7. User-generated content drives growth and conversions

As an anecdote, we grew our Instagram account by 540 percent in a year using user-generated content.

But let’s look at the data, too. L2 studied 250 brands in nine industries and discovered the wonderful impact of user-generated content on Instagram. Consumers who see a user-generated photo have a 4.5 percent higher chance of converting into a customer. This increases to 9.6 percent when the consumers interacted with the photo.

Furthermore, user-generated photos increase the likelihood to purchase by several times across various categories of goods — up to 6.4 times for apparels.

Even though it’s a study on (25 million user-generated) Facebook posts, Mavrck found that “user-generated content featuring a brand drove 6.9x higher engagement than brand-generated content“.

Instagram strategy takeaway:

Whether you want to increase your Instagram following, engagement, or conversion rates, user-generated content is a great strategy to experiment with. Many big brands like REI, Ben & Jerry’s and GoPro curate the best photos from their customers and post them on their own Instagram account.

To help you get started, here’s our guide to creating a user-generated content campaign.

8. Caption length doesn’t affect engagement

The general recommendation for the Instagram caption is to keep it short. For example, Sprout Social suggests that 138 to 150 characters are the best for maximizing engagement.

I believe there’s a good reason for the recommendation: Instagram only shows the first three lines of a caption and hides the rest behind a “more” button.

Interestingly, Simply Measured found that while the average caption by the top 100 global brands is 138 characters long (including hashtags), “there is no statistically significant correlation between caption length and engagement”.

Instagram strategy takeaway:

I personally believe that there isn’t an ideal length for a caption. A caption should be as long (or as short) as it needs to be to convey your message. It could be an emoji or a 2,000-character paragraph.

That said, if you want your entire caption to be displayed on the Instagram feed, Instagram recommends keeping your caption to 125 characters or fewer. HubSpot follows that with a great advice:

For that reason, it’s advised to limit captions to 125 characters. However, don’t leave out important information just for the sake of keeping your entire caption visible. Instead, frontload it with crucial details and calls-to-action, leaving any hashtags, @mentions, or extraneous information for the end.

What’s your favorite Instagram study?

Social media marketing is a very individual, specific endeavor. What might work for others might not always work for you. Instead of taking the findings of these studies as the whole truth, I prefer to see them as great starting points for my own social media experiments: Use them to form hypotheses, test various ideas, analyze the results, and iterate.

What hypotheses will you form with these eight tips?

• Instagram’s young audience likes current, creative, and useful content
• Posting frequency is not as important as posting consistency
• There isn’t a universal best time to post on Instagram
• Businesses cannot ignore Instagram Stories
• Using both hashtags and location tag drives the most engagement
• Videos might overtake images as the best content type
• User-generated content drives growth and conversions
• Caption length doesn’t affect engagement

What’s your favorite Instagram study from this blog post? Do the findings match your experiences? 

 

You might also enjoy these Instagram marketing resources:

  

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Image credit: Unsplash

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/instagram-marketing-tips-studies