Don’t Sweat the Likes: Choosing the Right Instagram Metrics for Your Business

We’re thankful social platforms provide so many metrics to help us evaluate campaign performance. Metrics have grown beyond the simple sums of likes: Now the most common platforms report saves, shares, profile visits and many other specific measurements. Should your goal be getting as many likes and followers as possible? (Maybe it is.) Or maybe you want an engaged audience, and going viral really isn’t your aim.

a comic about a dog letting go of its anxiety about Instagram metrics by selecting the correct performance metrics

Using a carefully planned measurement framework, you should track metrics that are specific to your goals—and don’t worry about out-of-the-box measurements provided by the platform. Sometimes, metrics you build yourself can address performance for your specific business objectives. For example, if you have a rapidly growing account and want to reflect variability in sharing across posts, normalize the count of shares by dividing by the number of followers at the time each of the posts was gathering shares.

Pacer isn’t the only Instapup. Read more about famous dogs (and wannabes) in this throwback to Tuna and in this post about Pace’s own Puppython.