Instagram is a powerful platform for businesses. But with Instagram Insights available to all Business Profiles, Instagram has become an even more powerful tool when it comes to helping you meet your business objectives.

Instagram Insights offer businesses an up-to-the-minute picture of things like who their followers are, which content they like and what they’re most likely take action on. With this information at your fingertips, it’s even easier to tailor your content to what you know your audience values the most.

Let’s take a more detailed look at some of the things that Instagram Insights can tell you and how that can help your business:

Impressions and reach: The first thing you’ll see on Insights is the total impressions, or number of times your posts have been seen on Instagram. You can also see your total reach, meaning the number of unique people who have seen or interacted with your posts.

Why it matters: Consistency is important when you’re promoting a business on Instagram: if impressions or reach drop, it could be because you’re posting less or that your posts are less popular than previous ones. This is also an important metric for measuring the effects of ads.

Popular posts: Which of your posts did people like the most? Insights shows you a visual grid of the posts that pique the most interest so that you can see what works, at a single glance.

Why it matters: When you understand which posts your followers love, you can give them even more of the content they value. Look out for clues—what do the most popular posts have in common? What can you do more of?

Single post insights: You can also find out the number of impressions, total reach and interactions on specific posts.

Why it matters:This is a great tool forfiguring out which posts to promote to non-followers when you’re building awareness. Say you’ve identified a few popular posts that you’re considering promoting on Instagram—use single post insights to decide which to use, based on audience reactions to date and taking into account your objectives. For example, if you’re looking for clicks to website, you’ll be able to identify the post that’s already delivered these best.

Followers: Insights can tell you more about who your followers are, from gender to age group to location and behaviors (like their most active times on Instagram). You need more than 100 followers for this metric to show up in Insights.

Why it matters: The better you know and understand your audience, the better you can serve them with content that’s relevant, at the right time. So, if the majority of your followers are female and aged 18-24, be sure to take that into accountin the content you post. If you know they’re most active in the evenings, schedule any high-impact posts (like special offers or announcements) to land when they’re most receptive.

You can also use Insights to monitor the performance of Instagram ads, with metrics available for stories, videos views, engagement and more.

With a wealth of insights available, it’s easy to hone your content to your audience and make decisions about where to direct your advertising budget with confidence. Once you’ve created or converted to a Business Profile on Instagram, you’ll automatically be able to access your insights, within the app. Just tap the bar chart icon at the top of your profile and start exploring.

In the next and final post of this series, we’ll be sharing our top tips for planning ahead for an inspirational 2018 on Instagram.

You can also take free, online training courses to help you better understand how to use Instagram to build your business.