For the first time ever I’m pulling back the curtain on one of my favorite end of the month reports: my instagram report😲. The first of the month is always my fave because I get to see what strategies worked, didn’t, and set my marketing to-do’s for the rest of the month.

So if you’re curious what this solopreneur gal has been up to behind the scenes on IG, keep reading.

Instagram report: My March and April results and my May plans.

Overall, my Instagram report for March was far more exciting than April. Let me start this post off by diving straight into March:

My March Goal: Grow my following by 100 new followers by the end of the month.

Why? Because while some people may shame me for pursuing Instagram follower growth (and I lost quite a *few* after announcing that on my IG stories one day…), I’ve been called to a season of growth. Instagram is one of the many strategies I use to grow my audience and help them solve their problems with gifts I’ve been given.💁

My March Strategy: Focus heavily on increasing new “reach” through the use of hashtag testing, shareable content, and social media collaborations.

Psst…if you don’t know what “reach is”, it’s the metric in your Instagram Business Account that measures the % of new eyeballs on your posts.

My March results?

• 29% increase in overall post impressions
• 78% increase in reach
• 102% increase on engagement rate
• Follower evolution was 66 (after all the fun follow/unfollow nonsense)

 

Ya, I was pumped that my strategies were obviously successful, but then PLOT TWIST.

I dug in more to my Instagram Business Insights in my account and noticed that the time of day I was posting each day in March, was not apparently the time of day that my Instagram users were most active.

🤔

So since I’m a big advocate of “best practice” and also testing each month, I added this to my list of things to test out for April.

Here was my April plan after reviewing those results:

My April Goal: Grow my following by 100 new followers by the end of the month.

My April Strategy:

• Continue with shareable content
• Back off social media collaborations*
• Start posting at 9pm EST instead of 12-1230 PM EST
• Start using Planoly to auto-post  posts for 9pm*

** My biggest March takeaway was this: INSTAGRAM GROWTH TAKES TIME. Social media collaborations were so helpful for my growth. Things like guest blog features and expert led workshops definitely generated their fair share of growth for my brand, but it also took a huge amount of coordinating time which wasn’t sustainable for the season of shop launch I was/am in.

I also decided that if Instagram said that 9pm EST was the best time to post, that it was going to have to be scheduled…

Because 9pm? This mama of 3 littles ain’t got time for all that.

My April Results:

• Total impressions down by 17%
• Total reach down by 24 %
• Total engagement rate down by 44%
• Follower evolution was -20

So what did I do with this super negative report?

As with any monthly report, I keep a list of important things that happened so I can refer to it in the future. I do a semi-formal write up (partly because of the 7+ years in corporate I can’t un-do and also because I’m just that nerdy…) that includes things like:

• What was the overall performance like month over month?

• What caused the overall performance month over month?

• What caused each key metric to increase or decrease?

• What lessons did you learn? Anything interesting stand out?

• What is the plan of action moving forward.

So here’s my semi-formal report write up aka “My May Plan For Instagram”:

Overall, my total number of followers remained unchanged month over month and remained at 10,358. In effort to spend more time in product development for my upcoming shop launch, I cut out social media collaborations and pursued auto-post scheduled captions using Planoly.

The results of these decisions led to a decrease across the board:

• Total impressions down by 17%
• Total reach down by 24 %
• Total engagement rate down by 44%
• Follower evolution was -20

 

Though the decrease in these KPI’s are significant, the increase in product development time was well worth it.

The biggest lessons I learned from April were:

• Posting just because Instagram says its “best practice” to post at the time of day your users are most active, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s “best” for your business
• Posting with the auto-post feature of Planoly may save time, but it also forces the hashtags to go into the caption itself instead of the comments, so now I need to test these 2 things before drawing a conclusion about if the impact was because of a) 9pm or if it was because of b) the scheduling tool or if it was because 3) hashtags were moved into the captions:

• Engagement at 9pm by posting manually with hashtags in the captions

• Engagement at 9pm by posting manually with hashtags in the comment

 

For the month of May, my goal is to continue to rely heavily on product development so that I can finally launch my shop. I should expect to see a decrease in impressions for the month of May because of that.

My May Goal is to reduce the time spent on Instagram content to continue to make more time for product development.

My May strategy is to:

• Use my content calendar to batch my Instagram captions and story content in advance to save time
• Continue to test new hashtags to increase reach and repurpose previously successful hashtag groups
• Go back to posting at 12-1230 EST manually with hashtags in comments
• Schedule some Instagram stories (yep, you can do that now!) to compensate for the time on my manual captions

So there you have it.

That’s what I’ve been up to on Insta and that’s how I handle my monthly reports.

I figure out the pros and cons, I prioritize how it fits into the grand scheme of my overall marketing plan, and take action according to what fits my unique biz and life best.

And I can rest assured knowing that my job is to just bring the faith, and His job is to provide the ultimate outcome.

Cheers to solopreneuring and ‘grammin’ this month. 🥂

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