I feel like I have been writing about Instagram too much lately. I can’t help it! It’s my current first love…

When it comes to Instagram Analytics, there are no real built-in options. You can, of course, measure your top stats–namely follower count and how many likes or comments each post gets.

If you want to do more in-depth analytics,  you have to go to a third-party option. My favourite? Iconosquare.

This little app does tons of good stuff. You can, for example, make fancy-pants “follow me on Instagram” buttons for the sidebar of your website or blog, and I particularly like the one that allows you to stream your Instgram posts. They also have a Facebook Cover Image generator.

But when it comes to Instagram analytics, Here are the things you need to be looking out for:

Overall number of followers: this is a great number to track, month-to-month. Ideally, of course, you want this number to be going up.

Number of likes per post: which of your posts over the last month got the highest number of likes? Now, it’s not enough to just note this. Once you have, it’s time to play detective: why?? Can you figure out what it was about those photos that got the most love? Was it the subject matter? Time of day? Quality of the photograph?

Best time of day to post: Iconoscquare shows you when your audience is most active on Instagram, which will then show you what are the best days, and best times of day, to post. Log in with your Instagram credentials, then go to Statistics–>Optimization.

Hashtags: hashtags rule on Instagram, but which ones are the best? Iconosquare tells you.

Further reading: 4 Free Instagram Analytics Tools

I’ll be back next week to wrap this series up!