The success of your Instagram account can really be summed up with one idea: the better you cater to your ideal follower, the more likely it is to succeed. To do this, we need to have a clear understanding of who our ideal follower is. 

If you’re starting an account from scratch, create the persona you would love to have as a customer and create your content with this persona in mind. But the reality is that many of us already have an account that was built up over a few years – in many cases, it might have even been done without ever considering the “ideal follower”. Lucky for us, Instagram offers a great tool to help us understand who’s following us: Follower Insights. 

To access follower insights, head to your profile, and locate “Insights” in the menu on the top right (the same menu where you’ll find things like settings and saved posts). Then head to Total followers to discover exactly who is following your account already. Here is a goldmine of valuable information that can help you target your content to fulfill the needs of YOUR specific audience. 

Top Locations

If you’re running a local business, this may already be pretty clear. On the other hand, if you have a global brand, this can help you narrow down the type of information you post during what time of the year. You may be located in snowy Calgary, but if 80% of your followers are in Brazil, you will want to adjust your content to share more things that they are interested in. For example, tips on shovelling snow in your driveway may not get very much engagement because it’s a pain point that doesn’t affect the vast majority of your Brazilian audience! Instead, you might consider focusing on a topic that is more likely to affect people in a warm country. 

Age Range

If you are ever surprised why a certain type of content performs better than another, the age range of your audience might be the key to answering that question! Every generation has different interests and different definitions of “interesting” and “relatable”. Understanding what age group most of your followers fall into can help you make more informed assumptions about why certain posts perform well, so that you can continue to create more content that your own audience finds useful.

You may have heard that reels are performing well, but haven’t been having much luck whenever you try to post them. A quick look at your insights might show you that your audience falls in the 45+ category, and might explain the general disinterest in a newer feature like reels. In this case, you could continue to focus more energy on regular posts, that your followers are more likely to enjoy and interact with. 

Gender

Like the other demographics, Gender might not give you all the answers but can help you make assumptions as to why certain posts perform better than others so that you can continue tailoring your content to what your audience needs. You may have never even thought about which gender’s found your content more interesting, and up until now, you might have expected a 50/50 split. Maybe you sell a pretty gender-neutral product, like cleaning supplies, but it turns out that 75% of your following consists of females. 

Use this information to see if there are better tips or more interesting content that would be better directed to your primarily female audience. This doesn’t mean that you should start posting everything in pink tones! But think about some common problems that females are more likely to face. If we’re thinking back to the cleaning supplies example, this could mean that you post the occasional tip on cleaning make-up stains using your product. Tips like this will be hitting on pain points that your followers are likely to have, which will make your account and brand more valuable to them!

Most Active Times

This is one of our favourite pieces of information on Instagram insights! Most active times shows you a breakdown of which days and which times your followers tend to be online. You can use this information to post at moments when your audience is most likely to see it. You could even use it to help inform what types of content they will find interesting! Does your audience tend to sit online in the morning or are they more likely to scroll Instagram during work hours? If most of your followers come online on Monday, could that mean that they are looking for some easy-going and mindless content to help take there thoughts off the long work week? Take this information and let it guide your content strategy!

Now that you understand the nuances of different types of audience insights, combine this information with the insights from specific posts to continue building the most targeted content strategy for your brand’s audience!