From the start, let me go ahead and warn you guys that all the apps today aren’t free. You know I love free stuff but sometimes you’ve got to pay to play. We are going to talk about 2 tools today that will analyze your Instagram hashtags, your profile, and your actual followers. Each of these can help you grow your followers longterm. They’re all tools you will use on your computer instead of your phone, so be aware of that as you look for these programs. 

Hashtags for Likes

This tool detects trending hashtags for a search of your choice and it instantly provides analytics, data, and other hashtag recommendations. You can use this information to increase your exposure. The search part is free but the paid version unlocks a ton of handy features for you to use. It starts at $38/month so it’s not an inexpensive tool. Before you sign up you probably will want to try the free features first just to see what works for you. 

Iconosquare

This program provides actionable Instagram analytics (say that 5 times fast) and industry benchmarks that can instantly make the difference in your strategy. So, what does that mean? It means it tracks your metrics. It’s still an analytics tool but it’s more about your profile and less about your hashtags. It includes metrics such as engagement rate per post, impressions history, and your follower evolution. It’s all about your posts. It does stories too and can help you gain insight on when to post, what’s getting the best engagement, and what types of impressions you’re getting on your stories. You can also generate insight on your profile activity itself, including your links and hashtag tracking. It also has the very cool feature of competitor tracking. 

It’s a complete analytics solution so it’s not free. It starts at $29/month. For the tools that it offers, that’s actually pretty reasonable. You just about can’t get an analytics tool these days for less than that and you want access to these numbers so you can find out if what you’re doing is actually working. This will be especially important when “likes” go away and you can no longer know. 

HypeAuditor

HypeAuditor is a tool to analyze your followers. It looks at your audience and checks for quality, demographics, and engagement. It’s a way to quickly make sure that you have real Instagram followers. You can see if people are fake or really engaging with your content. Your average engagement on an Instagram post is between 1% and 3%. Anything over that is incredible. If you can consistently get 5%, that’s amazing. However, there are people out there who claim to be influencers or micro-influencers who have thousands of followers, but if they have less than 1% engagement they’re fake. A lot of their followers are fake. You can’t unlock everything for free with this tool. It gives you a cursory glance and tells you the percentage of engagement for free. If you want to really zero in on your loyal audience, you need a report and with this app, you don’t pay by the month. You pay by the report. If you buy reports in a chunk of 10 it’s $99 but you’re not going to need to run a report every day. I’d be surprised if you run a report every other month so that should last for a while. 

Grow Your ‘Gram

Don’t forget that no matter how great your analytics tools are nothing will work if you aren’t posting quality content. Make sure that you are posting great graphics and you are posting consistently and watch your followers and engagement rise.