Instagram insights basics for expat language schools
DISCLAIMER: In the article below we are showing you a case study - so we’re analyzing the data of a real expat language school, for you to get a real-life look inside another school’s social media strategies.
HOWEVER, we are not using our client’s company name, nor are we sharing any data that might direct false traffic from this article to his actual profiles. We don’t want to obstruct the results he’s getting on his Instagram profile and we do not want to cause any confusion with his future campaigns due to false traffic.
ALL THE DATA PRESENTED BELOW is authentic and represented on ACTUAL SCREENSHOTS from his Instagram insights which he allowed us to use in our communication.
We have covered the sensitive data and used our own profile wherever the screenshot from his profile could reveal his identity. But even in places where we present our own profile, we give his actual results as an example to keep it relevant to expat language schools.
So you’ve been trying to grow your Instagram for a while now. You see other schools do it. And it seems like everyone makes it look so easy.
But for some reason, success keeps eluding you. Every time you get close to getting more likes, views, or comments on your post, something happens and you end up back where you started.
You are angry, tired, and disappointed - after all, you’ve spent so much time creating this beautiful graphic/ reel/ story!
Well, my friend - never again! 💪
Because it’s about time that you got serious about your Instagram. No more looking just at the number of followers, likes, and comments.
You ARE NOT a social media influencer - those are not your goals on Instagram! You have a language school and your goal is to sell courses! Correct me if I’m wrong? Didn’t think so 😉
From now on you’re going to be armed with the same tips, tricks and secrets that the top marketers are using when creating social media strategies and content.
Hey ho, let’s go?! 💪😎
Shortcuts:
Instagram Insights - basics
Many people are afraid of Instagram insights - all the charts and tables are, indeed, confusing and intimidating at first. No worries - we will walk you step-by-step through everything 🤗 And once you’ll get a hang of it - you might see them as one of the valuable tools for growing your sales!
Remember, that most of your insights update every 30 days (except for the data considering the content you upload - you can track the progress here for up to 2 years). So it is a good idea to schedule an hour or two every month on the same day to go through your Instagram data and see what’s happening. Don’t worry - after a while, it takes less and less time.
We have prepared a downloadable tracker for you to capture all of the most important data. You can either print it out or fill it out on your computer (remember to keep the blank one as a template!).
Please note, that those are the basics, so if you’re looking for more advanced resources - stay tuned, we have this article planned for you 😊
Before you start tracking your Instagram Insights
Define which marketing cycle are you in. Are you gathering, connecting, or selling?
Decide on your social media goal: more likes, comments or views is good for influencers and highly frustrating and counterproductive for product- or service-based businesses. You can focus, for example, on sales, inquires, interactions or brand awareness - depending on which marketing cycle you are in!
Define at which point of your marketing funnel, sales funnel and customer journey are the people visiting your Instagram profile.
Don’t start tracking too early - if you haven’t been doing anything on your profile and suddenly you start posting - you will obviously have amazing results. We have waited 3 months before creating the first report for our client.
Don’t give yourself false praise for growing engagement 300% - if you haven’t been posting for months 300% might be one comment and that result gives you absolutely no useful data… Don’t fool yourself 🤷♀️
However - you can start looking at what your audience is reacting to best immediately, which might allow you to create more appealing content. In that case, watch the trends mentioned in the last point of this article for the first 1-2 months.
But remember - marketing is about testing and trying to figure out why things worked or didn’t. So if you'll focus too much on following the trends you see in your insights you might actually lose a chance to experiment with something that would work even better.
Conclusion: start seriously tracking after around 3 months of consistent posting. Before that, you can check insights for trends, but don’t get deviated by them - follow through with your initial content strategy and compare the data after a significant period of consistent, strategic content.
Get your free Instagram Insights tracker now:
Where to find Instagram insights
As mentioned - it might be overwhelming at the very beginning. But no worries - we’ll walk you through it step-by-step. First - where to find the Instagram insights.
Instagram is a mobile-first app. It is easier to access your insights through the app on your phone. In this article, we will be sharing the screenshots from the mobile app. But - in case you want to access insights from the desktop - we will show you how to do that as well below.
Where to find Instagram insights - mobile app
From the main screen go to the bottom right corner.
Tap your logo/avatar to access your profile.
Below your bio (short description) tap “insights”.
Et voila! You’re in! 😊 Let the games begin! 😎
Where to find Instagram insights on desktop
Go to Facebook’s Creator Studio.
Click the Instagram icon in the top bar.
Click “Insights” in the left sidebar.
Et voila! You’re in! 😊
Here you can view either your Activity or your Audience for the last 7 days. As we said - the desktop version of the insights is far more limited than the mobile one, so try to use the app if possible.
Important Instagram metrics to track for expat language schools
We are fully aware that jumping into your analytics can leave you breathless for a moment.
What we suggest is that - at the very first attempt, you play around a little bit, have a look at what is where, and then come back to our instructions and extract the data you need.
Social media goals
First and foremost - as we’ve told you at the beginning - you need to know your social media goals.
Our client’s main goals are obviously course sales, but here’s what we expect from his social media channels:
to pull traffic to his website, where people can get more info about his current courses and sign up or message for more details;
get direct messages from people inquiring about the courses.
When those Insights were collected he was in a befriending phase of his marketing cycle.
Here are our client’s Instagram Insights, conclusions, and suggestions on how to read your own data:
Recent highlights
This is the first screen you see upon logging in. As you can see our client has really good metrics.
In the last 30 days we observe:
+103.4% more content interactions
+74.1% accounts reached
+5.7% total followers
Now - even though those numbers are quite impressive - we are not getting carried away, as Instagram IS NOT our client’s main social media channel.
How do we know that?
We have crossed-verified the data from Instagram with our website analytics and real-life observations to find out that:
53% of the social media traffic to our client’s website comes from YouTube (paid Google ads), 39% from Facebook, and only 7.9% from Instagram
Most of the inquires come via email, a smaller amount through Facebook Messenger, once in a blue moon he gets an Instagram direct message.
The overwhelming majority of the current and previous students pointed to Facebook as their main source of information about life in their new country (including learning the new language)
Top locations
[Go to Insights ➡ your audience]
As we have mentioned at the beginning of this article - the amount of followers and interactions isn’t as important as the quality of those leads.
This is why you cross-verify your reached accounts and interactions with “top locations” - are the profiles interacting with your account your potential clients or did you somehow hit the algorithm with a hashtag or one of your posts went viral?
In the case of our client:
80.4% of the traffic comes from the country where his school is located
53.6% of his traffic comes from the city where his school is located
The other 4 cities within his top 5 are also located in his country.
3 out of 4 top cities are neighboring cities, which means that people from there might be working or frequently traveling to the city which is his location (potential students).
Those results are meeting our expectations and we are happy with them.
Overview ➡ Accounts reached
Here is when your social media goals play the key factor for you to understand the actual value of your social profile.
If you look at our client’s Insights without knowing our goals - you will be very impressed:
+85.4% more impressions
+43.1% profile visits
+100% direction taps
Wow, right?! 🤩 Yes - if we were running an influencer type of profile. If that’s your goal - those stats are great for you.
In our case, however, we want to get course inquires and re-direct people to our website. This means that the most interesting insight for us will be “Website Taps”.
Our “Website Taps” is down by 9.1%. There might be different reasons for that - investigate them closely. Were you running more paid promotions in the previous month? Have you been posting more often? Did you change the type of content you’re posting?
In our client’s case, we were not very alarmed, because we were in the “befriending” phase of our marketing cycle: we were not selling but creating connections with our audience.
That means that most of our content was not redirecting people to our website, but trying to initiate a conversation, showcase our expertise and community.
If we were in the sales season however most of our posts would be directing people to our sales page and we would get a negative result in our “Website Taps” - that would be a reason to worry and we would have to figure out why our efforts didn’t bring people to our sales page.
Content Interactions
We were very happy to see that we’ve had an increase of 103.4% in interactions since as mentioned above - our client was in a befriending phase of his marketing cycle.
This means that those metrics were the most important to us in that month.
You can see that we didn’t have any story or IGTV video interactions - it is intentional. Since Instagram is not our main channel - we do not invest time and/or money into creating videos.
TIP: cross-verifying your analytics from your social profiles, website, and ongoing student surveys will give you a clear picture of where to invest!
Follower breakdown
[Go to Your Audience ➡ tap See All]
Here we can see what was the total growth of the account.
As you can see - it is not an exceptionally impressive number at only 5.7% growth.
Now - this would’ve been a concern if we were in a gathering phase, when our main goal would be to get as many eyeballs on us as possible.
But since we are befriending - our main focus is on interactions. Plus - as mentioned above - Instagram is not our client’s main social channel, so we wouldn’t pivot our entire strategy if those numbers weren’t high during the gathering phase.
TIP: another useful data you can get from this insight is the unfollows. As you can see in this case all the unfollows happened on the exact same day, which means that we can go back and see what kind of posts makes people leave our profile.
Sociometrics
[Go to Your Audience ➡ tap See All ➡ Follower breakdown]
This data matches exactly our client’s student avatar, so there were no surprises here.
TIP: How can you use this data?
Well - if you haven’t created your “buyer persona” - first of all IT IS ABOUT TIME YOU DO THAT (do not underestimate the power of perfect targeting!), second - use the data from your insights to define your audience and create your ideal student avatar.
This avatar is crucial to all of your marketing and branding actions:
creating sales and marketing funnels,
designing customer journeys,
creating content,
optimizing your website,
deciding on lead magnets,
targeting your ads
and many, many more!
Most active times
[Go to Your Audience ➡ tap See All ➡ Follower breakdown]
In the case of our client, those data contributed to absolutely nothing: his followers are active 7 days per week between 9:00 and 21:00 😉🤷♀️
But in your case you might see increased activity on specific days or times. If Instagram is a big source of leads or sales for you - consider changing your posting times to those when your clients are most active.
Remember: if Instagram is not a big contributor to your overall sales or inquiries - do not change your entire social media strategy based on those Insights. Focus your changes on your most profitable channel.
Post metrics
[Go to Content You Shared ➡ tap the arrow on the right]
The screenshots here are obviously from our profile in order to keep our client’s results “clean” - we don’t want to chase “fake interest” back to his account and base our marketing moves on false data.
Here you can play around with the metrics and see what type of content performed best.
Here are the conclusions we’ve had for our client:
Posts with people/ faces had higher interactions, but not necessarily higher reach.
We were testing a strategy of giving a shoutout on our profile to another loosely connected business with a potentially similar audience. It didn't bring more interactions or reach. We might try calling out a more active account next time to compare results and see whether it really doesn't work for us.
Quote type of graphic with solid background performed really poorly- might be due to strong background color, since the other quote type graphics did much better.
Reminder: While analyzing the content popularity take under consideration the marketing cycle you were in and your main social media goals!
Get your free Instagram Insights tracker now:
Conclusions
Instagram is not the main social platform for our client. As you have seen above - after cross-verifying with our website analytics, real-life observations, and constantly surveying the students* we know as a fact, that this is our least popular channel.
This is why we don’t waste much time or resources on it. We do keep it alive, but we prioritize (both financially and time-wise) our other social channels.
How do we do that?
Here are some actionable tips you can use if Instagram is also not your main performer, but it’s still worth keeping it alive:
We create our social media content in the universal size of 1080x1080 px (that way you can post the same graphic/video on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn without losing the quality and reach)
We pre-schedule posts for both Facebook and Instagram directly from Facebook Business Suite - that way the content we create populates both Facebook and Instagram feeds without any additional work (obviously it works the same if you’re using any other scheduling tool)
We don’t spend time creating stories and reels. At this point, we focus our client’s finances and time on other, far more successful in his case actions - creating lead magnets (free downloadable resources), Facebook ads (not Instagram ads), and email marketing.
What’s next?
Sit down and have a good look at your Instagram profile:
Be firm about the results you’re getting - a big following or impressive growth might not mean anything to your overall growth.
Cross-verify your Instagram Insights with other data - your website analytics, student surveys, your inboxes.
Answer sincerely: are you sure you’re not wasting your time and money on Instagram (or Facebook/ LinkedIn/ TikTok)? If you are - how can you keep your profile alive without additional effort? (use our client’s example above!)
Use your Insights wisely while planning your social media content.
Hopefully, now you can see the real value of your Instagram Insights. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg...
Save up to 4 hours a week on content creation and increase student enrollments!
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creating a full, professional content strategy
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So if you want a crystal clear and predictable roadmap to help you get more students, look no further!
* all it takes are three simple questions: how did you learn about our school, what convinced you to sign up for our course, and which social media platforms are you using most often.
