How To Use Flick’s Internal Benchmarks to Your Advantage

Understanding where you should focus your attention in order to grow your Instagram account can be confusing. While you can do your research by following blogs and Instagram Growth Experts, Instagram’s constant new updates means the data provided tends to become outdated just as quickly as it’s written.

Insteps Internal Benchmarks: Uncover areas you’re succeeding in and other places that could use some extra love and attention to help your account grow. If you’re a content creator, social media manager, small business or just curious about your Instagram stats, being able to access reliable, up-to-date information that will help your account grow and succeed is a must.

From this article, you’ll find key info for each internal benchmark you can see, and most importantly, how you can use the data to keep yourself one step ahead of the competition. And the best part? You can access everything you need directly from your Flick account!

Internal benchmarks, much like their slightly older cousin, open-benchmarks are a suite of tools to help you see how different areas of your account stacks up against other Instagram accounts with a similar following size to you.

Here, you will get a complete breakdown of everything you can see from your Overview Page. What’s the total weekly reach of your account compared to others? How many people viewed your Instagram profile in a month compared to the average? Discover all of that and more in the stats below:

1. Follower Growth Rate

Discover how your follower growth rate compares to those around you. With this metric, you’ll be able to understand if your content is driving people to follow you.

2. Reach & Impressions

Check out if similar users are reaching the same amount of people as you are. Reach is the number of unique users who interact with your content, whereas Impressions refers to the total number of times when users were exposed to your content.

3. Profile Views

A combination of profile view, website clicks and email clicks. This metric aims to give you a better understanding of how much your content drives people to visit your Instagram profile.

4. Website Clicks

The total number of times the link displayed on your profile has been clicked in the selected time frame.

Compare all the detailed reports of your image, video posts, and carousels direct from the Content Tab!

1. Posting Frequencies

The total amount of feed posts an Instagram user makes in a given time period. You can use this as a great baseline for your own strategy.

2. Unique Hashtags Ranked

The total amount of unique hashtags a user utilizes in a given time period.

3. True Engagement Rate

Get a clearer insight into your true engagement rate. True engagement is the total number of Instagram users who like, comment or save a post divided by the total number of users who saw that post. This means you get to see how others around you are performing on their actual posts and not just a percentage of their last 12!

4. Average Engagement Per Post

The average amount of engagement an Instagram user gets on their posts, although this is not a ‘true’ engagement rate. If you want to see how your Instagram account performs over a number of posts, this is the metric you want to look at.

Now it’s time to focus on your Stories. Uncover all of our Story specific metrics here:

1. Number of Stories

The average amount of stories made during a given time period. Similar to feed post frequency, you can see how other accounts are using Stories.

2. Completion Rate

The average rate of completion of all your Stories. This will help you understand the overall effectiveness of your Stories. The higher the completion rate, the more your audience is interested in your content.

3. Average Impressions per Story

The average amount of reach an Instagram user gets on their posts in a given time period.

4. Slides per Impression

The average amount of story slides a user views before closing out of a user's story. This metric can help guide you to the perfect length of your Story. Knowing how long you can keep your audience engaged can help you create a more tailored experience for your audience.

We all know that hashtags are super important when it comes to reaching more people on Instagram. The right hashtags can be the difference between your post flopping, or your post flying. The metrics below will help you identify where you stack up and where you may need to improve. You’ll find these in the Hashtags Tab!

1. Hashtag Usage

The average amount of hashtags used per feed post by users in a given time period. We recommend using all 30 hashtags in your post to give you the best possible chance to reach as many people as you can.

2. Rank Ratio

The number of hashtags you rank on, divided by the number of hashtags you use in a time period. Understand how accounts are ranking, and see where you fit in.

3. Total Time Ranking

The total amount of time you spend ranking on hashtags in a given time period. This can help you see how long a post stays relevant on the ‘Top Posts’ feed.

4. Average Rank

The average best position your posts ranked in the ‘top posts’ feed on the hashtags you ranked on, in the selected time-frame.

It’s nice to know how your posts are performing, but how does that relate back to growing your account? From the Account Tab you’ll be able to check to see how your reach is boosting your Instagram with stats like:

1. Follower Rate

The total number of followers you had at the end of your selected timeframe. See if your follower count matches those around you.

2. Reach Rate

The average reach of your feed posts compared to the number of followers you have. Knowing your Reach Rate can help indicate if your posts are reaching as many people as expected.

3. Conversion Rate

The number of new followers you gain, divided by the Instagram users visiting your profile in a given time period. Why is this important? This will help indicate if your content is reaching your target audience. Want to know what a conversion rate is on Instagram?

4. Click-Through Rate

The number of clicks to your website or email divided by the total amount of profile views your Instagram account received in a time period.

So now you have the data, but how do you utilize it? Being able to understand these Benchmarks will ultimately help you decide which areas you need to improve on and which ones you’re already succeeding.

While focusing on the areas you’re doing really well in is great, knowing the total time you rank on hashtags for, and how that compares to other accounts, will be helpful in growing your Instagram page.

This will differ from account to account! For example, at Flick, we may be more interested in increasing our profile activity and clickthrough rate and focus heavily on those metrics. However, an influencer may be more focused on increasing follower growth and engagement rate. Before going more in-depth with your Benchmarks, it’s important to identify what metrics are important to you for your overall growth.

Although these metrics might not be your KPIs, (Key Performance Indicators aka goals you’re trying to reach for your account) metrics that are below average could help with some quick and easy wins to improve your overall account.

Start by reviewing each section of the Benchmarks:

1. Overview

2. Content

3. Hashtags

4. Account

Once you’ve explored each of your metrics, note which ones you’re running below average on and how you can work to increase these over time.

If your “posting frequency” is below average, the answer is simple. Post more content! If your “unique hashtags used” is below average, mix up your hashtag strategy! Experiment and find the best hashtags for your account to use, and if you don’t have the time to research, use Flick’s hashtag tool to help you easily find the best ones for your account type.

FYI: You don’t have to be the same as the average, just start working on getting closer to it!