How to Know if Your Instagram Strategy is Working

Ah, numbers. 

Everyone hates them, until they realize how useful they are. 

Okay that’s an unfair assumption but I did loathe high school math and *now* I love numbers because I realized how important they are for reporting on my client’s progress and determining if our Instagram strategy is working. 

So the short answer to knowing if your social media strategy is working: check your numbers!

Keep on scrolling for the long(ish) answer. 

Maintain a Weekly Social Media Report

A weekly Instagram report gives you the chance to quickly check in and see what’s going on with your Instagram performance. 

A weekly report should include the amount of content you posted (the number of reels, grid posts, stories, etc) as well as your followers, content interactions, reach, impressions, profile visits, and website clicks.

While those numbers alone are helpful, they don’t give you the full picture. A weekly report should include the percentage increase or decrease compared to the week before, and compared to that week last year. This will quickly tell you if your numbers are going up or down so you can dig into your content and figure out what’s causing the change. 

As a general rule of thumb: if your numbers are going up, your Instagram strategy is working well, or you’re on the right track. If the opposite is true for a period of several weeks, it’s time to change something. 

That doesn’t mean redo your Instagram strategy. It might mean using more or less video, posting at a different time of day, or adjusting your caption length. Small tweaks can add up! And so many factors go into your social media performance so when you see a dip, don’t panic. 

If you’re not into creating your own reports, get the weekly Instagram report template I use for myself and my clients in Scale Without Stress.

Get a Comprehensive Overview with a Monthly Instagram Report

Things get a little more time-consuming but a lot more insightful with a monthly Instagram report. For two reasons. 

Reason #1: you’ll be reviewing an entire month of data which gives you a lot more information than one week. 

Reason #2: you won’t just be looking at your numbers, you’ll review your individual content performance to determine the top and bottom performing posts, stories, and reels, so you can really dig in and see what’s working and what’s not. 

How to Create a Monthly Instagram Report

The first step is to review the current month’s numbers compared to last month’s. Use the same metrics as your weekly report: amount of content posted, followers, content interactions, reach, impressions, profile visits, and website clicks.

The second step is to find your top performing and bottom performing content. If you’re on Instagram you’ll look at grid posts, reels, and stories. If you’re on TikTok you can look at videos and stories. If you’re on Facebook you’ll look at feed posts.

I highly recommend using reach as the metric to determine what is a top or bottom performer, and gathering these posts in some kind of document so you can visually compare them. You’ll learn a lot about what kind of photography style, graphic style, story design, etc work best for your community when you can review the content visually. 

The third step is to review all of this content and make a list of action items. For example: if you notice bright, bold photography is doing better than the darker photos, share that info with your photographer. If you’re noticing a particular story design isn’t performing well, nix it. 

It sounds like a lot of work, but once you get the hang of it, it should take you 1-2 hours every month. Not only will you know for certain if your social media strategy is working, you’ll be able to constantly improve your social media presence so that all the time and energy you spend on the platforms doesn’t go to waste. 

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Hiiii! 👋🏻 I’m Sarah, an online entrepreneur & marketer of over 10 years. I went from starting a clean beauty blog right out of high school to managing social media for Canada’s largest wellness retailer. Now I live in the middle of nowhere in North Carolina, helping high-growth entrepreneurs get SEEN so they can build a crazy fun life their business supports, and not the other way around.

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