How to Audit Your Instagram in 5 Steps

Posting on Instagram and having a strategy behind what you post are two very different things. An Instagram audit is how you find out which one you’ve got.

You might know your brand inside out. You might have a notes app full of content ideas and be posting every week without fail. But working out what’s actually bringing in enquiries, and what you should be doing next, is hard when you’re this close to it. That’s why we never write a strategy for a client until we’ve audited where they are now.

A proper audit isn’t scrolling back through your feed to see which posts got the most likes. It means stepping back and looking at how your goals, your audience and your content are working together (or not). There’s a lot more that goes into a full strategy, but these five steps are the starting point we use with every client, and you can do them yourself.

Before you open your analytics, get clear on what you want Instagram to do for your business. “I want to grow” isn’t a goal. Grow what, and why?

Maybe you need more people to know you exist. Maybe you need bookings or website clicks. Maybe you want to be the name people think of first in your industry.

Your goal decides what you pay attention to for the rest of the audit. A new restaurant chasing awareness should be watching reach and shares. An HR consultancy looking for leads cares far more about DMs and enquiries.

This is also why we don’t hand out template strategies. Two businesses can post very similar content and need completely different things from it.

You know what your business does. Someone landing on your page for the first time doesn’t.

Open your profile and pretend you’ve never heard of yourself. Can you tell straight away what the business does and who it’s for? Is there a reason to stick around?

Check your bio, profile picture, link, pinned posts and Highlights, then look at your last nine posts. If that was all someone ever saw of you, would they come away with the right impression? Does the feed feel like one brand with a clear message, or does it look like it’s been put together by whoever had five minutes that week?

We see this one a lot. What feels obvious inside the business often isn’t obvious at all from the outside, and that gap is usually where the positioning needs work.

Now look beyond your own account. Pick a few businesses in your space who are going after the same customer as you.

Watch what they talk about and how they position themselves. Which formats seem to land with their audience? What are people asking in the comments?

Then look for what’s missing.

Be honest with yourself here, too. Are you comparing yourself to businesses at the same stage as you?

An established brand can post a beautiful image with barely a caption and still do well, because their audience already knows who they are and why they should care. A newer business doesn’t have that luxury yet. Your content has to work much harder. It needs to explain what you offer and give a stranger a reason to trust you.

When we launched a new restaurant for one of our hospitality clients, nobody knew the name yet. Pretty plates on their own weren’t going to fill it. So we built the launch around the executive chef’s story, his local produce and a cinematic trailer, so people understood what they’d be paying for before they ever booked. It was fully booked at launch, and six months on it’s still full with the right people paying the premium prices.

Study the big names by all means. Just understand why their approach works for them before you borrow it. The point of a competitor audit is to see what your audience is already seeing, so you can spot where there’s room for you to do something different. Often the most useful thing you’ll find is a gap nobody else is filling.

This is where your analytics come in. But your best-performing post isn’t automatically your best content.

Look at a decent stretch of time, at least a few months, rather than one or two posts that happened to fly. You’re looking for patterns.

What’s reaching new people? What gets shared or saved? What sends people to your profile, and which posts never seem to go anywhere?

Then go one layer deeper. Was it the topic that worked, or the hook in the first couple of seconds? Was it the format, or the fact there was a real person on camera? Do the same with the posts that flopped.

You’re not trying to label posts good or bad. You’re trying to understand why some land and some don’t. Analytics tell you what happened. Working out why, and what to do about it, is the part that takes experience.

You’ve got the information. Now you decide what to do with it.

Start with the topics your brand needs to own. These become your content pillars, and every one should tie back to the goals you wrote down in step one.

Then think about how each topic comes to life. Maybe your educational Reels are bringing new people in while your carousels get saved. Maybe your audience responds far better when there’s a face in the content. Maybe the polished shoot content builds credibility, but the casual behind-the-scenes clips get the comments.

Let that shape what you make next.

Every post on your calendar should have a reason to be there. You should know who it’s for and what you want someone to do after seeing it. Posting just to stay active is how feeds end up full of content nobody remembers. We’d always rather a client posted less, as long as every post is worth stopping for.

Every six months is a good rhythm for most businesses. Do one sooner if you’re about to launch something, if your results have dipped for a few months running, or if your business has changed and your feed hasn’t caught up.

You can do everything above yourself, and it’s well worth doing. The hard part is staying objective about your own brand. An outside view tends to spot the gaps you’ve stopped noticing.

You don’t need to overhaul everything at once, and you definitely don’t need to chase what’s working for someone else. Get honest about where you are now and the next decisions get a lot easier.

If you’d like a second pair of eyes on it, we’re a social media agency in Bournemouth and we offer social media audits for businesses who want an outside view before they plan their next few months. Get in touch and we’ll take a look.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​