Higher Ed Marketing Memos: 3 Reasons to Switch to Instagram Business Account by Meg Keniston #hesm

A summer of social media change(s)

I don’t know about you, but this summer felt like a constant reminder that social media platforms can change at any moment and either really enhance your well-thought out content strategy and plans or take you back to the drawing board.

What was a very welcomed development for me (someone who has a social media budget, but not a lot of extra spending room) was Instagram introducing business profiles and analytics tools.

Many colleges and universities have moved over to the business account. Some were hesitant because, knowing Facebook, there could come a time when Instagram Business profiles get buried a little bit more in news feeds. I thought about that, but my need for (free) analytics rose to the top, so I jumped right in and linked up the University’s account to our Facebook page. After a couple months of using them, here are some of the biggest advantages I’ve found.

Basic analytics – now available!

Before, my Instagram analytics for Instagram were… well, lacking.

My piecemeal Excel spreadsheet with data I manually calculated wasn’t impressive, nor was it entirely accurate. Periodically, I used free tools that have become paid services or I’ve run trials so I can cobble together bits and pieces of data here and there, but now I’m running on all cylinders.

Instagram analytics are simple.

I can see the total number of times each of our posts are seen (impressions), the total number of unique accounts that see our posts (reach) and total engagement, which includes likes and comments.

Other things I like about Instagram Business analytics:

• Profile views and clicks to our website – Two stats I never had access to before but am grateful to have now.
  
• Follower breakdown – Now you can see what days and times your followers are online, the gender breakdown, the age range, and the location (by city and country).
  
• Top posts – I love the ability to toggle so quickly between top posts by impression, reach, engagement, likes and comments over a certain amount of time. Being able to do this within the app has saved me some serious time trying to do it on my own.
  

Improved ways to measure hashtags and geotags

Our university Instagram account typically only uses hashtags related to our community, but I know a lot of colleges and universities use many more than I choose to use.

Thanks to Instagram for Business, we can all start figuring this part out a little bit better!

• Which hashtags get our content in front of more people?
• Does using them translate into new followers and more engagement?

I’m excited to A/B test with different hashtags – same goes for geotags, too – to see which ones give me the most for my Monopoly money. One of my Student Social Media Team members did it for her small business’ Instagram account this summer and it was very telling…

Connecting with audience members through direct messages

Within a week of making our Instagram account an official business account, I started receiving messages from prospective students looking for more information about our majors, extracurricular activities, and in some cases, more detailed information about particular posts.

This happens a few times a week and makes it easier to put these prospective students in touch with my colleagues in Admissions or to answer quick questions.

This is fantastic for higher ed, especially as Generation Z comes to college.

We’ve noticed in our own social media efforts that high school students have been growing weary of asking questions publicly and have seen them trend more towards communicating directly or anonymously.

Instagram is a platform students are using to research colleges and universities and now they have a quick way of calling, emailing, or messaging us to make sure we answer their lingering questions – and they can do so privately and comfortably.

What I’m missing in my Instagram Business Account

Even with all of these great new features, there are a couple of things I can’t do yet:

• Download my Instagram data directly to Excel. So I may not be calculating as much as I was before, but I am still manually entering data myself.
• Connect our separate student-run Instagram account to our Facebook page to get analytics there. As it stands, a Facebook page can only be linked to one Instagram account.

Maybe I’m not being crafty enough.
Maybe I’m overlooking something completely obvious!

Have you found a work-around for either of these?
Are you using the business tools in more creative ways?

Let me know in the comments!

Meet the Author: Meg Bernier Keniston

Meg Bernier Keniston is the Associate Director of Marketing at St. Lawrence University. She is also a graduate of Higher Ed Experts’ professional certificate program in Social Media Measurement for Higher Ed