Followers and likes feel good and prove almost nothing. Here are the five numbers I check first on any business account, where to find them, and what a healthy answer looks like.
1. Profile visits to website clicks
In Instagram's professional dashboard, look at profile visits and website taps over the last 90 days. If hundreds of people visit your profile and almost none tap through, your bio, link and highlights are not doing their job. That is usually a one-afternoon fix.
2. Messages and comments that are actually questions
Scroll your inbox and comments for the last month and count how many were real buying questions: hours, prices, availability, "do you do X." Then count how many got answered within a day. For a local business, these are leads. Unanswered leads are the most expensive thing on your page.
3. Reach from non-followers
Instagram shows what share of your reach came from accounts that do not follow you. If it is near zero, you are talking to the same people every week and the page cannot grow without paid support. Reels and collaborator posts are the two organic ways to move this number.
4. What you spent, and what it bought
Open your ad spend for the last 90 days, including boosts. Now write next to it how many inquiries, bookings or sales you can trace to it. If the second column is blank, that is the finding. It does not mean the money was wasted; it means nobody set it up to be measured. (If you are relying on the Boost button, read this first.)
5. The "last ten customers" test
Ask your front desk, your sales person or yourself: where did the last ten customers come from? If "Instagram" or "Facebook" is on that list, the page is working, whatever the follower count says. If it is not, and you are spending time or money on it, something needs to change: the content, the audience, the offer or the way you capture the lead.
What to ignore
- Follower count by itself. A thousand local followers who buy beat fifty thousand who do not.
- Likes on posts with no call to action.
- Any metric compared with a national brand's. Compare with your own last quarter.
If you want a second pair of eyes
These five checks are the first page of the written report I send in a free social media audit. You can also run the 10-point self-audit yourself in about twenty minutes.