Something you don’t hear too many bloggers mention on their platform is growth, but behind the scenes it’s something that’s talked about a lot. Of course, engagement is very important as well (how many likes or comments your photos are receiving) in order to prove your “influence” to brands that are hiring you, but like I mentioned in this post, growth is what I tend to focus on, and engagement comes along with it.
There are two resources I use to track my growth. One is free, and one I pay a small monthly fee to have. Here they are!
1 – Socialblade.com
This is the biggest tool I use to view my daily growth. It’s 100% free, and you can see the growth of ANY instagrammer if you’re thinking of hiring them, or if you are just curious. I tend to view other influential bloggers growth as well, and if I notice their growth rate increases I will pay attention a bit closer to see what they’re doing differently, OR I will just come out and ask them! It makes for great conversation, and they are usually pretty flattered to hear that others are taking notice of their hard work!
In my opinion, the graph showing follower growth over time is the most important, because it shows whether someone slowly grew a following over many years, or whether they had one large spike in growth, or many large spikes. You can see that this month I had one spike, because Zoella mentioned me in her Story and I gained 7K followers in one day (INSANE, I WAS MIND BLOWN). Other than that my growth has been pretty steady, and you can see it sped up since I left my full time job around April of 2017. A lot of people who participate in loop giveaways have a more scattered growth chart, with tons of spikes and dips, when people follow and then unfollow. You can see ALL of that in social blade, and it’s so interesting to study how someone has grown.
2 – Iconosquare
I love having iconosquare for a more in depth view at my Community, Content and Engagement rates. It breaks down on a week-to-week or month-to-month basis gained VS lost followers, engagement rates, and a breakdown of top performing images. Instagram analytics for business accounts have recently become a lot better, so I question whether I still need this account sometimes, but it allows me to comment back to people in an organized way, so I love it for that reason also. Through iconosquare I can mark comments as read, and respond back individually to each person. Instagram doesn’t separate likes and comments, and makes it very hard to view new comments on older images, so Iconosquare is great for that as well!
Both of these are great tools that have helped me to be more aware of my numbers, and to be able to use my analytics to help me create more content that performs well with my audiences! I figured I would share, since so many of you ask about the behind the scenes of running a blog!
I hope this helped, let me know in the comments – and let me know if these kind of more “business” focus posts are interesting to you!