Can You Measure Instagram ROI for Your Brand?

August 27, 2014
2:00 pm

Posted by DMA Solutions Team

For those of you who have hopped on the Instagram bandwagon, you’re already aware of how much fun this visual sharing network can be! For fresh produce brands, this social media platform has become integral for making additional consumer brand connections beyond Facebook and Twitter. In fact, studies have shown that Instagram is the best social platform for brands in terms of direct fan/follower engagement with your posts.

Many brands report three times the engagement on Instagram compared to other social media networks.

So if Instagram is the hot place to be if you’re trying to build consumer evangelists for your brand, how do you measure ROI for this platform?

For Facebook, we can run advertisements and insights provide us with an idea of our cost per click, our paid reach, our organic reach, and our overall organic engagement on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. On Twitter we can dive down into ow.ly or bit.ly clicks and determine what our most successful tweets were in terms of driving traffic back to our websites. With Pinterest we can see the referral traffic spiking from a successful recipe pin, and for all networks we see what worked to convert consumers. But Instagram is a closed platform that doesn’t include external links other than your main URL in your profile. So aside from your followers, how do you know if it’s even working for you?

It’s a tough question that this social platform hasn’t fully addressed for brands, and I suspect the answer will be evolving in the near future with the introduction of promoted posts and advertising. But for now, the short answer is that unless you are an e-commerce brand selling a product online, it is very hard to measure direct ROI for your company from Instagram. Without external links, you are likely to record little to no referral traffic from the app, and since Instagram doesn’t provide us with impressions data, we are left with only our followers and likes on our photos.

Yet you still shouldn’t let the current limitations stop you from creating and building an Instagram presence for your fresh products. There’s no doubt that consumers love this highly visual platform, and since we as fresh produce marketers have such beautiful, colorful and attractive products to share, Instagram is a perfect fit for using our food photography to create consumer connections. On top of that, the insights tools are definitely coming our way from the folks over at Instagram; it’s just a matter of when they will be available. In the meantime, here are a few shortcuts we’ve used to help us better quantify what we’re getting out of our Instagram efforts:

Calculate Engagement Rate

If Instagram truly does produce a higher engagement rate for brands, it might be worth monitoring this number regularly. Simply take your total number of followers and divide that by the number of likes and comments on any given post. Incorporating this practice could help you to get a better idea of what types of photos inspire the most engagement from your audience, or what time of day is the most successful for you to post.

Create a Unique Landing Page URL to Share

As a closed platform, URLs in Instagram unfortunately do not link out of the application, so your fans can’t click to visit the way they would in Twitter or on Facebook. This means that if you were to share a URL on a post, the fan would have to copy it into their browser and that traffic would be recorded as direct traffic instead of an Instagram referral. One way you can combat this and see if your fans will indeed visit your website from an Instagram post is to create a unique URL that you are only sharing on Instagram. Include this URL in your photo caption and if your analytics tools are showing that traffic is coming to the page, you can infer that these are Instagram visitors!

Encourage Fans to “Click Link in Profile”

Lots of fashion websites and blogs have really mastered the ability to convert their fans from Instagram, and it’s really quite simple how they do it: encourage people to visit your profile for a link to “get more” in your photo caption! For example, if you were to post a photo of a delicious tomato soup recipe, you could include “link in profile for recipe” in the caption to drive interested fans to your website.

Subscribe to a Third-Party Analytics Provider

Similar to how we use Hootsuite to better track and analyze what’s happening on Twitter, you can subscribe to a service that helps brands with Instagram. Piquora is one solution we’ve found that offers a suite of analytics and content to help directly monitor and respond to Instagram chatter surrounding your brand. Advanced hashtag tracking metrics and influencer analytics are just a few of the valuable resources this tool provides.

No matter how you decide to measure your Instagram performance, it is clear that NOW is a valuable time to begin building your Instagram presence in anticipation for when the new insights features roll out. You will certainly be in good company: powerhouse retail brands like Victoria’s Secret and Michael Kors have over a million followers, and brands like Chipotle, Chobani, KIND Snacks and Oreo are making their presence on this platform known. As a part of our ongoing efforts to keep our seat at the food marketing table, fresh produce marketers should consider how an investment in this social platform will payoff in time.