Keeping track

Illustration/Uday Mohite

In an era when people are conducting business on Instagram and leveraging the platform to become influencers, it's crucial to keep a tab on your target audience. While the insights feature on the Instagram app itself gives you a pretty detailed account of your audience - gender, age group and the time at which people are most actively looking at your posts - a new app, also called Insights, is filling in the blanks by giving information on the engagement quotient of your posts and notifying you when someone unfollows you. That is, if you have a public account to start with.

City-based fashion and beauty influencer Salisha Talwar, who has more than 7,000 followers and has been using the app for 10 days, says it gives statistical information, like the average engagement percentage, average number of likes and comments on your last four posts, which comes in handy as clients ask for screenshots of the same when they approach you for collaborations to see how many people your posts are reaching.

But the most important feature is the immediate notification you get when someone unfollows you. It also helps you groom an organic following instead of falling prey to the practice wherein someone unfollows you if you don't follow them back. "This happens a lot, as people just want to increase their followers. So, the app helps me weed out those who won't read my content," Talwar explains.

For business accounts like that of skincare brand Indulgeo Essentials, which has sales coming in primarily via Instagram, the unfollow notification also helps them know what content works and what doesn't. Kyraa Manchandani, who handles their Insta account, says, "We know if the content is inappropriate or plain boring. The account has over 20,000 followers but it wasn't reflecting in the number of likes. So, we tried videos and realised people would rather watch skincare videos than read posts, even though the caption has all the information."

The app gives you a list of people who have stopped following you and engagement percentage; the Insta feature gives the location and age of followers (below)

The glitch is that it also shows accounts that have been deactivated in the unfollowers list, though they haven't intentionally unfollowed you.

And then there's the ghost follower feature which tells you about those who don't like or comment on your posts, but are still following you. But this could also mean that they are just not active on Instagram. So, you need to check before you write someone off.

The app has a pro feature at '80 per month, which lets you with the option of instantly unfollowing those who have unfollowed you. You can download an unlimited number of other people's stories and save them. It also helps you know who's stalking you, which influencers haven't taken to yet in India, but reckon, will help ward off creeps - a much-needed tool for a public presence.

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