Instagram’s looking to provide more data for marketers with an update to its Insights element for business and creator profiles, which will give you more specific info on who’s engaging with your content – whether they follow your profile or not – as well as the total reach of your posts.

The new data points will help guide your posting decisions, and provide more opportunity to optimize your approach based on more specific data points.

The new metrics being added to Instagram insights are:

• Accounts engaged – This will show the total number of accounts that interacted with your content in a given time period
• Engaged audience – This data will provide demographic insights into the users that are engaging with your content, whether they follow your profile or not, including top cities, top countries, top age ranges and gender
• Reached Audience – Similar to Engaged Audience, this will provide demographic information about the people you’ve reached with your posts in a given time period, including top cities, top countries, top age ranges and gender

Worth also noting that back in May, Instagram updated its Accounts Reached data, adding in more specifics about the types of accounts you’re reaching (followers vs. non-followers) and the content formats that are driving the best performance for your profile.

These new demographic insights will now be incorporated into the data, providing a more comprehensive view of who you're reaching with your different IG posts, and how, specifically, they’re engaging.

The additional data points could be a huge addition, with increased capacity to drive specific performance notes, and optimize your content approach based on what’s working. The location data, in particular, could help you optimize your posting schedule based on when these users are more likely to be online (region-specific) while the age and gender data will help you build more accurate audience personas for your targeting.

In addition to this, Instagram’s also looking to add more transparency to brand/creator partnerships, with a new data-sharing process that will enable creators to see the insights data available to the business.

As explained by Instagram:

“When a brand promotes a creator’s post with the paid partnership label or creates an ad without a pre-existing post, that creator will now be able to see the performance of that ad including reach, likes, comments, saves and shares. Creators can now find this information by selecting “view ads and insights” within the branded content ads section in settings.”

Up till now, tagged business partners have been able to view the reach and engagement of influencer/creator posts, but that same data sharing hasn’t gone the other way in these specific applications. Now creators will also be able to track their performance, which they can then use in their own process and pitches to help build their business.

These are some handy updates for IG marketers, just in time for the holidays, and definitely, it’ll be worth digging into the new insights to measure your performance, and optimize your approach.

You can learn more about Instagram’s new Insights updates here.