How to do an Instagram Audit and What You Should Know

Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms with millions of users all over the world. There are also millions of fake accounts on the platform for various reasons. With that said, you need to do an Instagram audit every now and then to make sure none of these fake accounts are associated with yours.

Instagram doesn’t like fake accounts and reacts strongly to them – deleting them and keeping a close eye on those linked to them.

An Instagram audit is something that all users of the platform should do quite regularly. It is especially important for business accounts. An audit also helps to make sure that you’re still on track with your marketing strategy.

Why Is An Instagram Audit Important?

As a brand or business, you need your online activity to be aligned with your marketing goals. 

When you run an Instagram audit of your Instagram profile and account, you will be looking at every aspect of your account. You will be able to identify any content that isn’t good for your brand or is not performing as well as you’d hoped.

Sticking to your goals can be tough if you need to create content to post every day and it’s easy to lose your way.

With an audit, you can put your account back on track again.

Also, you’ll be able to spot ghost accounts that do nothing for your Instagram presence.

An Instagram audit is like spring cleaning – an opportunity to get your account shining and achieving goals again.

How To Get Started With An Instagram Audit

Right, now that you know that you need to have an audit on Instagram as regularly as possible, let’s discuss how to do it.

There are several things you need to keep in mind when you are running an audit. Don’t worry, we’ll guide you so you can get the most out of your audit.

Goals

In order to run an Instagram audit, you need to know exactly what your goals for your Instagram account are.

Your goals should support the business goals that you have for your brand and complement them.

How does your Instagram marketing fit into your overall marketing strategies? Is your account achieving those goals?

Here are some examples of questions you should be asking:

• How has your account performed over the last 6 months?
• Is the content presenting your brand in a positive light?
• Does your account reach your target audience?
• What kind of content is doing well? What content isn’t?
• Is your account getting satisfactorily engagement?

Key Performance Indicators

Your Key Performance Indicators – KPIs – are linked to your goals and will indicate whether or not your account is performing as expected.

Your Instagram audit will help you determine if tangible progress has been made to achieve your goals.

Important metrics for your Instagram account could be:

Following growth – have you gained new followers in the last 3/6 months?

Interactions – Is your audience commenting on your posts and sharing them?

Traffic conversions – Are people following your call to actions and landing on your website(s)?

Your KPIs and goals will depend on your marketing strategy and need to be evaluated constantly. When you do an Instagram audit, you should be looking closely at your account’s data and compare it to what you hoped to achieve.

We suggest that you do an audit on Instagram at the very least once a year. If you really want to stay on top of things, do one every six months. 

Because audits can take some time to be done well, doing it every 12 months might be the best option for a busy brand.

Set aside a date for your audit and get it done – you really can’t afford to skip doing it. Not if you’re serious about your business.

How To Do An Instagram Audit

Now, let’s get into how you can run an audit on Instagram. If you follow our advice, you should be able to get your account back to where you wanted it with no hassles.

Examine Your Account’s Feel And Look

The first step in your audit should be to take an honest and thorough look at your account. Examine your profile and feed.

When you designed your marketing strategy, you likely had a certain appearance, visual style, and tone that you wanted to achieve.

Brands need to have a cohesive style to promote brand loyalty and recognition.

Is your account sticking to that style? Are posts complementing each other and your brand’s mission?

Is high-quality content being shared consistently? You need to post consistently and create a sense of reliability with your audience.

If you need help in posting consistent content, SocialPlanner is an awesome content calendar that will save you a lot of time. You can schedule posts and trust SocialPlanner to take care of them for you. Plus, they can find trending posts that you can share and increase your engagement with.

It is also important that your Instagram account’s appearance is consistent and in-line with the rest of your online presence.

If a potential customer sees your account, can they associate it with your website and other social media accounts? You don’t want to confuse your audience and make them wonder if they’ve found the right account.

How does your Instagram feed look? You need to give your followers a pleasing feed that will keep them coming back for more.

This can be a little tricky to achieve but is far from impossible. Share content that is interesting and looks amazing. Instagram is a very visual platform and people expect to see pleasing images and videos.

Your Bio

Many brands forget the importance of a good and detailed bio on Instagram. You need a great Instagram profile picture, preferably your company logo.

In your bio, you must have all the essential info about your brand as well as a link to your website(s).

You can boast with achievements in your bio and change it often to keep it fresh and up-to-date.

Clean Up Your Followers

As a brand, part of your business goals is to get engagement from your audience. You want people to reach out and communicate.

It’s likely that you also want a certain amount of followers. What you don’t want is a following that is filled with fake/ghost followers.

People tend to assume that an account with fake followers is shady, and you don’t want that. Plus, ghost followers don’t engage with any of your Instagram posts.

Often, fake followers are created by bots and they’re fairly easy to spot – a combo of letters and numbers for a name, the account is private and there is no profile picture.

We suggest that you go through your followers list and examine them closely. There is no point in having followers who aren’t beneficial to your Instagram account.

You can block or remove the followers that you have found to be fake or idle. To determine that, look at their activity and profiles.

An account that is never posting or sharing posts is not one that’s going to interact with your content. Users who comment strangely on posts are probably fake – why would a person say ‘nice pic’ when you’ve shared a video?

You will notice that the quality of your following goes up once you’ve gotten rid of the dead baggage your account is carrying.

We would advise against doing bulk deleting. Instagram might see this as an automated activity and this could affect your profile’s visibility.

Instagram wants organic activity and is quite stern about it. That’s why accounts are monitored for having unusual numbers. If you have a certain amount of followers but your engagement doesn’t reflect that, you’ll get a bad reputation.

If you feel that you need an Instagram follow tracker to do things professionally, there are many social media marketing tools to choose from.

Follower Analyzer and Followers Track for Instagram are some of the most popular options.

As part of your audit on Instagram (or any platform for that matter), you should make sure to shake off all those followers that do you no favours.

Engagement

The engagement that your Instagram posts get is really important – it’s what shows Instagram that you are real and not messing around with fakeness.

By having organic engagement, you please the Instagram algorithm and increase your chances of being seen by more people on the platform.

There are many ways to increase your engagement that is natural and effective.

You can share Instagram Stories that have a great call to action and comment on your followers’ posts.

Working with influencers and other creatives is also a super idea. You’ll be able to reach a lot more people when working with someone else to create new content. Take a look at our Influencer Marketing guide for a better understanding.

We also suggest that you make use of video content. Videos are very popular with people everywhere and will get a lot more attention. And more attention = more engagement.

If you can work in some interesting Instagram Ads into your engagement strategy, that would be a great idea. As long as you keep things creative and avoid being dull and repetitive. (And don’t copy other people’s ideas)

Replying to comments on your own Instagram posts and responding to Direct Messages are also great ideas. For a more in-depth discussion read our guide: How to use Instagram.

For your Instagram audit, make note of all your posts that have good engagement and those that don’t. Learn from them so you don’t create anything that won’t get people engaged.

Post And Captions

Your Instagram posts and captions that accompany them are more important than many people realise.

You should never post random content and expect your followers to be happy. If you’re in a specific industry, they’ll expect posts that are related to it.

The posts that you share should relate to your business goals. They should be consistent and have a similar feel and look.

Take a good look at your posts. Are you sharing your best content that is clear and precise while being entertaining?

Do they have the same aesthetic as your brand and other social media accounts? Following a specific colour scheme seems like a minor detail but is very important.

For example, when you see the white and red colours of Coca-Cola, you immediately associate it with the brand. The same goes for Cadbury – they stick to the same rich purple with all their social media branding and content.

Your captions are just as important. They must follow the same tone and reflect your company’s mission.

Take note of how posts with bigger captions perform in comparison to posts with only a few words added. Which do best and reach more people?

If you find posts that aren’t using good captions or aren’t performing well because of their captions, get rid of them.

Also, if you’ve shared posts with bad quality images, we suggest that you delete them. Instagram is a visual platform and the standard is high. If your content isn’t of the highest possible content, no one is going to want to see it.

Hashtags

Making creative use of hashtags is very important on Instagram – they’re a great way to build your following. It is possible to use up to 30 hashtags in one post but that can look like overkill so consider using a little less.

The sweet spot seems to be about 20 hashtags, which will get your posts in front of a lot of people.

Remember that you shouldn’t just use hashtags that are trending for the sake of trending. For example, if your post is about vacations in the Caribbean, using the hashtag #cutekittens won’t make sense. Unless your photo has kittens running around on a beach. 

Keep the hashtags you use related to your content and your industry. That way, you’ll reach the people who are more likely to engage.

If you have old posts that don’t meet these requirements, delete them and don’t repeat the mistake.

Instagram Audit FAQ

We will discuss some frequently asked questions related to running an audit of your profile and account. You should find the answers you were looking for here.

Instagram Fake Followers Check App

There are apps out there that will help you keep track of your followers on Instagram. We’ve mentioned some of them in the discussion of followers.

But since Instagram doesn’t offer any assistance with this aspect of having an Instagram account, you should use as much help as you can get.

That means using a third-party application and finding one can prove tricky, especially if you don’t know which are trustworthy and which aren’t.

We suggest that you give Influencer Marketing Hub’s article, ‘16 Top Instagram Followers Trackers’, a look. You should be able to find exactly what you need there.

FakeFind is another awesome option if you’re overwhelmed by options and don’t know which one to choose. You could always try all of them until you find the best one for your account.

IG Audit Alternative

IG Audit was a nice tool with which you could do audits but it has been shut down by Facebook. It was able to check fake accounts and was very useful in spotting fake accounts.

As a result, many users are desperate for alternatives that can help them now that they can’t use IG Audit.

We think that the options we suggested throughout our article should help you and will serve as great alternatives to IG Audit.

How Much Does It Cost To Have An Instagram Account?

If you’re new to Instagram and think that it must be expensive to have an account on such a popular social media platform, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

It doesn’t cost you anything to create an account, whether you want a personal one or a business one.

You don’t need a massive budget to have Instagram as part of your marketing strategy. However, if you want to use features such as advertisements and the Business Sticker, some money may eventually have to be spent.

When it comes to advertising on Instagram, there are several factors that will influence how much you spend.

Your relevance score, action rates and more will affect how much advertising will cost you.

Are Instagram Bots Dangerous?

Instagram bots are not real people, as you might already know, and apart from making you look bad, they’re not dangerous.

Bots make accounts look bad because they’re fake and might give the impression that the account is buying a fake following.

All they really do is like posts and videos and follow accounts randomly. At least, as far as we know.

It is possible that these bots are after private information such as names, birth dates, credit card info, and more.

Does Instagram Remove Fake Followers?

Instagram has indeed been removing fake accounts from their platform since about 2014. The platform has gone as far as building tools to identify accounts that use apps to boost their followers.

How Many Instagram Followers Do You Need To Get Paid?

You will find that you don’t need as many followers as you think to start earning real money on Instagram.

It all really depends on your industry, how engaged your followers are, and which revenues you follow.

You can become an influencer to earn money and for that, you may need a strong following of thousands.

To be a brand ambassador, you also need to have enough followers to please brands. The number required depends on the brands you want to work with.

You can earn money on Instagram if you only have 1 000 followers – as long as they’re very engaged. That’s one of the most important factors for many brands. They don’t want someone who has millions of followers but little engagement.

You can also become an affiliate, open your own store, and sell your own goods. For that, the number of followers you need will vary from one situation to the next.

How Do I Get Rid Of Fake Followers?

Unfortunately, you have to go through your followers and identify the fake accounts to delete them. Manually is the best way to go in this case.

You can also use the tools we’ve mentioned to find these fake followers and make your task easier.

Conclusion

Doing an Instagram audit is important and vital to make sure that your social media marketing strategy is effective. It’s also a great way to get rid of fake followers that can affect your account’s reputation with Instagram.

For more information on how to make the most of social media marketing, be sure to take a look at our social media blog.