Easy Instagram Audit Guide: Process, Tools & Checklist 2024
One of the first things you should do if you want to up your Instagram game, is running an Instagram audit. Not sure where to start? Let us help you!
Posted last year
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Tania braukamperPosted last year
So you want to improve your Instagram account. But there’s one thing you should do before you start talking strategy or hitting post – you need to run an Instagram audit.
Because if you don’t analyze exactly what your problems are, how can you fix them?
An Instagram audit is a systematic way of going through each aspect of your Instagram account to see how it is currently performing and what you could do to improve it.
Is your bio up to date? Are you nailing your captions and hashtags? Are you engaging with the right types of accounts?
Those are just a few of the questions you’ll be answering as we take you through a step-by-step guide to how to do an Instagram audit – checklist included!
Jump to a section ✨
Step By Step Instagram Audit
Whether you’re a brand, a business, or even a digital creator, you need to follow a series of steps to audit your Instagram account. We’ll walk you through the key things you need to be looking out for, which will help you flag what you might need to change on your account, that you might not have noticed before. Let’s get going!
Revisit your goals🏅
The first thing you can do to audit your Instagram account is to go back to the ‘why’ of it all. Start from scratch rather than trying to tackle a million different issues at once. What are you hoping to gain from being on Instagram?
Businesses often get caught up in trying to increase their follower count while ignoring other metrics and underlying goals. You can have thousands of followers on your Instagram, but if they aren’t engaging, or are passive to your content, it won’t mean much. Ultimately, you don’t just want people to follow you – you want them to do something more.
Maybe you want them to become aware of your brand, buy your product, or sign up for your newsletter. Maybe you just want to reach and connect with people who have similar interests or start a conversation online about something you are passionate about.
Growing your numbers is important as a starting point, but not all that useful without that ultimate conversion that you want. So, consider what your broader business and marketing goals are, and then make sure your Instagram activity aligns with those goals.
Let’s drive this home with an example: Say one of your business goals is to increase foot traffic into a physical store. Posting pretty content to people across the other side of the world isn’t going to be much help. Instead, you might use Instagram’s location tags to find potential customers nearby, post Stories directly from the store, and so on. If you plan on hosting events, workshops, or experiences in-store, publicize this on your Instagram to reach your ideal attendees, and build up exclusivity.
CHECKLIST ✅
- Define or revisit the core goal of your Instagram account.
Ensure your Instagram activity is aligned with your broader business goals/marketing plan.
Audit your profile 🔍
Your Instagram profile: That thing you set up once and never have to worry about again.
Right? 🤔
As if…! Let’s revisit it.
Firstly, what purpose does your profile have? People might look at it to:
- Decide whether to follow you
- Determine whether your brand/business is reputable
- Find out more about how to buy/use your product or service
- Find your contact information, web address or other details
Your bio summarizes who you are, and what you want to communicate to your audience or prospective followers, so it’s really important to get it right. There are a lot of things you could include in the bio of your Instagram profile, so keep the first step above in mind and choose what best fits your business goals.
At a minimum, your bio should give people an overview of your brand. It’s also a great opportunity to include a call to action, brand or campaign hashtags, and website links. A helpful resource is Linktree if you want to include multiple links in your bio without making it too busy.
You’ll also want to make sure your profile pic represents your business and is consistent with all your other branding materials (other social media accounts, website, etc.)
CHECKLIST ✅
- Check that your username is easy to find/spell and represents your brand.
- Make sure your profile pic is consistent with your branding (e.g. your logo).
- Write a bio that gets to the essence of what your brand is/does.
- Ensure your bio shows your brand voice and personality.
- Promote campaign hashtags and/or web links in your bio section.
- To allow your business to come up in search, add 1-3 keywords to your Instagram profile name.
Stradivarius use their bio to encourage user-generated content, to promote brand hashtags, and to provide a shopping link.
Check the consistency of your brand message 💌
Your “brand” is really a collection of things that identifies you and differentiate you from your competitors. If you don’t have consistency, you don’t have a brand.
Instagram is an important platform for spreading your brand message and generating awareness, so let’s make sure you’re being consistent across every part of it.
A good idea here is to create a social media style guide (or audit your existing one to make sure it’s up to date). That way, regardless of who is managing the account, the voice, tone, aesthetics, and brand message are all consistent and on point.
(Note: Even if you’re a personal brand or the dedicated manager of the Instagram account, writing out a style guide can still be useful.) With Instagram, you can be a little more playful than on other platforms, so make sure you have fun with it, but don’t stray too far from your overall brand messaging – there’s always a happy medium.
Consistency is also important across social media platforms, as well as across Instagram as a whole. Consider your posts, IGTV, Instagram Stories, and interactions with other users as touchpoints that should consistently deliver your pre-defined brand message. Check that you are interacting with your followers, and staying up to date with any questions, complaints, or interactions you may have.
CHECKLIST ✅
- Pick a consistent color theme.
- Establish your overall tone of voice and language that is in line with your branding.
- Ensure branding elements like logos, icons, fonts, etc, are consistent
- Create a clearly documented style guide.
Hershey’s use consistent and recognizable styling across their account.
Audit your content 🌈
Finally, we come to the actual content. Yes, it should be visually appealing and nice to look at. But there’s more to it than that.
At this step of the Instagram audit, you should take a look back through your recent content and identify what has performed well and what hasn’t.
Also, think about why. Have some posts fallen flat because the quality isn’t up to scratch? Or perhaps because they strayed from your brand message? What did you do right in your most successful posts and how can you do more of it? If you have experimented with content mediums, establish what has worked best for you, whether it be videos or static posts. Ask yourself whether you could be doing more on your account to deliver exclusive and exciting content and if the answer is yes, start brainstorming.
Although it can be useful to analyze your account and recent posts with descriptions and note-taking, don’t forget to use your analytics and numbers to your advantage! Measuring your metrics can give you a clear indication of what works and what to focus on in the future to help keep your audience engaged.
What metrics should you be tracking? Well, it depends on your goals. Here are some of the most important data to keep tabs on. You can track these metrics within the Instagram app, manually or using an Instagram audit tool (read about our favorites later in this post):
- Impressions – total number of times your posts have been viewed.
- Engagement rate – the percentage of follower count who interacts with a post by liking or commenting (a reasonable engagement rate is between 1-5% of your total follower count).
- Follower growth – your growth as a percentage.
- Conversion rate – the percentage of viewers who take action on your post, for example, the proportion of people who sign up for your email list or make a purchase after viewing an Instagram story.
- Clicks on stories – how many people click on your link in an Instagram story.
- Shares – how many accounts share your posts to their stories or send them to friends.
Read our previous guide about what metrics you need to track when doing your Instagram audit.
To summarise, when it comes to how to do an Instagram audit, take notes on how your content performs and keep track of the numbers that reflect your growth.
Take a look at your captions ✍️
The quality of your images and videos is one thing, but don’t neglect your captions. Captions can enhance your content, improve engagement, and drive conversion.
All of your captions should be well-written and in a style that fits your brand. They should inform, inspire or add a level of storytelling to your visual content. Another excellent use of captions is asking questions to generate engagement.
Your captions should ideally grab attention in the first line since followers will have to deliberately click “more” to see the rest.
(If you want to get deeper in and really nail your captions, check out this guide to writing Instagram captions.)
CHECKLIST ✅
- Upload images and videos that are consistently high quality.
- Make sure the videos and images fit in with your overall grid and aesthetic.
- Don’t post irregularly. Set up a system to make sure you are posting consistently.
- Pay attention to the best times to post and schedule your content accordingly.
- Utilize all areas of Instagram including Instagram Stories.
- Use a software tool to keep track of your data and analyze your numbers on a monthly basis.
Swarovski incorporates questions into their captions to encourage followers to engage in the comments.
Check your hashtags #️⃣
Hashtags are one of the best ways to get your content discovered. Think of it this way: a post without hashtags is like a little island, disconnected from the rest of the Instagram world. Hashtags are a bridge that connects your content to the mainland.
Are you making the most of hashtags? Are you using them on Stories as well as posts? Are you using niche hashtags, location hashtags, audience-specific hashtags, or community hashtags?
(If you’re not sure about the different types of hashtags and how to build a hashtag strategy, read our Instagram hashtags complete guide to learn all about it!)
Choosing the right hashtags maximizes your chance of getting to the top of Instagram search results and getting your content seen. Flick’s #1 hashtag tool is an easy way to discover what those right hashtags are, so try it out if you want to really make the best use of your hashtag potential.
CHECKLIST ✅
- Hashtags should be contextually relevant to the content you are posting.
- Your hashtags should be a mix of broad and specific/niche.
- Avoid using banned or flagged hashtags.
- Make sure the hashtags you use are formatted and presented in a consistent way across all posts.
- Encourage followers to use branded or campaign hashtags.
Audit your engagement 🤝
Instagram is a two-way street.
Do you communicate with followers and engage with the broader Instagram community? If not, you should. If so, could you be doing it better?
The more you integrate into the Instagram community, the more likely you are to win followers and get your brand noticed. Create conversations, ask questions, host mini-campaigns, or even highlight user-generated content, and try new things to integrate in a clever and effective way.
CHECKLIST ✅
- Reply to comments and DMs regularly and promptly.
- Follow accounts that are related to your niche.
- Collaborate with other accounts or brands to boost your engagement.
- Repost user-generated content to your account.
Take a look at your posting schedule📅
Don’t forget to consider the time that you are posting your content! Although posting time matters less than it used with the new Instagram algorithm, timing your content so it goes live when your audience is likely to be using the app can help your engagement.
Use the Instagram Insights tab within the app to check when your followers are most active or play around with your posting schedule to determine the most successful time to post your content.
CHECKLIST ✅
- Check Instagram Insights to see when your followers are the most active. Then, pay attention to the best times to post and schedule your content accordingly.
- Experiment with days and times of posting.
- Experiment with posting frequency.
- When you have a schedule, don’t post irregularly. Set up a system to make sure you are posting consistently.
Get rid of fake followers 🤖
You’re now on the home stretch, and it’s time to get rid of the fake and inactive followers with an Instagram follower audit!
Every account on Instagram will inevitably end up with a collection of bot followers. Similarly, if you have had your account for many years, you may end up with a collection of followers Instagram has recognized as no longer active.
The reason for deleting these accounts from your following is that they may damage your engagement rate over time. When you publish something new, Instagram shows your latest post to a smaller portion of your followers and monitors how many accounts interact with it. If your post performs well with this sample, the platform will likely recommend your post to more accounts.
Conversely, if it performs poorly because the accounts sent the post aren’t engaging, you could notice a slow decline in your impressions and reach.
Fortunately, it’s easier than you may expect to spot a fake or inactive account, otherwise known as a ghost follower. Typically they will have a username that seems random, or it may contain several numbers, a low followers number with a high following count (usually in the multiple of thousands). Bot accounts will also probably not have a profile picture or any posts on their account.
Now you need to cleanse your Instagram of fake and inactive followers. Although there are several Instagram bot checker apps on the market, in our experience, you can’t safely use software to block bot accounts without risking blocking genuine accounts from followers who don’t choose to post themselves.
Unfortunately, the only option left is to manually delete accounts you deem as fake or inactive, using the above criteria as a guide. This process can take a number of hours, but it will be worth it when you can increase your engagement rate over time.
You can use a tool such as Influencer Marketing Hub’s free fake follower checker that will give you a rough estimate of what proportion of your followers are inactive or fake. Then you know roughly how often a ghost account is following your page and how many you need to delete.
Then you can set aside time to go through your followers in small chunks and weed out any suspicious-looking pages. Instagram will let you search through your followers alphabetically to keep track of where you left off. Go to your profile, click followers, and then use the search bar at the top.
You may also wish to block accounts that regularly follow and then unfollow your account. These accounts aren’t representative of authentic engagement on social media and can end up hurting your analytics in the long run.
CHECKLIST ✅
- Set aside time each week to go through your fake followers and delete any suspicious-looking accounts.
- Block accounts that regularly follow and unfollow your page.
- Delete accounts that seem like spam as and when they follow you to keep on top of your fake followers.
Analyze your Competition🆚
After auditing your profile and content, turn your attention to conducting a competitor audit.
Analyzing the mistakes and successes of your competition can give you some new insights into what to do differently on your page.
We recommend choosing 3-5 of the competitors in your niche. Then take 10-15 minutes to study each of their profiles, and take notes on what they seem to have done successfully and what you think needs improvement.
You might want to consider looking into factors such as:
- Their followers count.
- Their brand imagery.
- Whether they predominantly use photographs, graphics, or video content.
- Are they using Instagram ads?
- What keywords are targeting?
Let’s take a look at two chocolate brand pages. If you were running this vegan chocolate company’s Instagram (left), you could compare it with other popular chocolate bars.
Although this isn’t direct competition, you can see that analyzing the KitKat Instagram page could give Vego Chocolate some ideas about improving its content.
Here are some examples of how we would suggest improving the Vego Instagram page:
- You can see that KitKat uses distinct brand imagery with its use of color and logo, which is evident from the profile picture to the story icons to the feed itself. Therefore, Vego could improve its visuals by enhancing its brand consistency.
- It could also utilize the extra features available on Instagram, which KitKat is taking advantage of, such as saving Instagram stories to a highlight section, using reels, Instagram video (formerly IGTV), and even creating their own filter for IG stories.
- KitKat also posts far more frequently and has over 800 previous posts on their feed (vs just 25 from Vego) and engage with 65 accounts they follow (vs just 4 from Vego).
- KitKat also uses a clear call to action ‘read more’ in its bio and utilizes the bio by adding in relevant brand hashtags.
CHECKLIST ✅
- Find a small number of close competitors to analyze.
- Analyze their profiles.
- Consider what they are doing successfully and how you can replicate this on your page.
- Use this time to note any keywords they are targeting.
Tools to help with your Instagram audit🛠️
You can use the features within the Instagram app to conduct a thorough audit of your account.
However, if you are looking for an Instagram audit tool, here are a few excellent recommendations:
Flick
Finding hashtags to add to your content to improve your reach and search can be an uphill task. Luckily, Flick makes it easier than ever to find, manage and analyze your hashtags, saving you time and a headache while maximizing your Instagram profile’s chances of getting seen by your target audience in search.
You can also use its Analytics suite to see various insights on your posting pattern and hashtag use that Instagram does not provide. We might be a bit biased, but it’s a pretty powerful tool to audit and grow your Instagram account.
HypeAuditor
Hypeauditor is a comprehensive Instagram audit tool that allows you to view your Instagram analytics in-depth, convert your data into visually appealing graphs, and check for potential bot accounts in one place.
Iconosquare
Iconosquare allows you to gain access to detailed social media analytics and reports to help you analyze your account. Your review will contain insights into where your account is performing well and where you can improve on. Simply connect your Instagram account and submit your email for your free review!
Sociality.io
As mentioned, you’ll also need to consider auditing your competition. With Sociality.io, you can gain insight into how other brands in your niche are performing on Instagram. Therefore you can use this tool to measure your growth and compare it to your competition’s growth in one place.
Complete Instagram audit checklist✅
Let’s recap how to do an Instagram audit with a checklist. You may wish to bookmark this page to refer to as these steps will likely take you a few hours to a few days to complete.
Ready To Audit?
Hopefully, you’ve found this Instagram audit checklist and step-by-step guide helpful. Of course, this is not completely exhaustive – there are other things you might start to look at and pay attention to as you go along.
But you should definitely be checking these things as a minimum.
How often should you conduct an Instagram audit? There’s no hard and fast rule: we’d suggest that for a business or brand trying to grow and improve its account, once every month to every few months is a good idea.
That way, you’re consciously taking stock of what you’re doing rather than just posing content on autopilot.
And the more conscious you are of your Instagram activity, the better positioned you’ll be to master it as a marketing tool.
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