How Kicker grew their Instagram audience by 50% with Iconosquare's competitor analysis

As one of the fastest growing social media platforms and already over 800 million users, Instagram is a very competitive space where first impressions count and audience engagement is the pinnacle of success. The ever changing algorithms don’t help either, making growing your brand and audience a mission.

But with the right tools, there are ways to get the most out of each and every post to achieve growth. Here’s how one brand did just that with the help of Iconosquare.

Challenges

Growing your audience on a platform that is already saturated with brands jostling for new followers is a hard task. With so much content being presented to Instagram users, it really does come down to the age-old saying ‘first impressions count’. Aside from the challenge of growing an audience, a brand has to retain it using clever, engaging and authentic content. The only way to do this is to engage and be authentic yourself.

Once follower numbers increase and engagement grows, a whole different set of challenges arises. On top of keeping up engagement, relevant content and consistent posting is essential to keep the momentum going. This can be a really time-consuming task, one that isn’t viable for a lot of companies — especially when competitor analysis and tracking also needs to be a focus.

Kicker was no different. The challenge of understanding and providing good content to engage their audience was massive, especially as their follower numbers grew. Kicker soon realized that an analytics and social media management platform was needed.

With engagement and website traffic as the main focus of Kicker’s social media strategy, it was important that the tool they used was going to easily and clearly give them access to up-to-date, accurate information – fast.

Solution

After investigating other platforms, it became clear that the price and developer time required to create the custom API needed to get the results and detail that Kicker wanted was going to be an issue.

Enter Iconosquare. With its advanced Analytics section, which includes metrics such as audience engagement and content performance, broken down by Post and Instagram Stories analytics, as well as its Competitor Tracking tool, Iconosquare was exactly what Kicker was after.

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“Getting analytical details out of Instagram was like getting blood from a stone. Iconosquare offered a revolutionary set of analytical tools that allowed adeep-dive into the mindset of our followers.” Bill Braun, Social Media at Kicker

Advanced Analytics: Understand engagement metrics such as likes and comments history, best time to post and hashtag performance

Prior to using Iconosquare, the team wasn’t aware they could get some of the statistics that Iconosquare offered. Now they are able to break down how their content is performing on a post-by-post basis, what resonates the best with their audience and when the best time to post is to get maximum engagement.

Competitor Tracking: Track performance of your competitors with metrics such as total follower growth, number of likes and comments and industry hashtag usage

Having a clear understanding of how Kicker’s competitors (and their content) were performing meant that the team gained an up-to-date industry overview of what content works and what doesn’t – without having to go through the pain of testing everything themselves first. They’ve been able to see the latest media and the hashtags that their competitors are using and integrate those that work into their own strategy.

Results

Now with an audience of 137k followers on Instagram alone, Kicker has seen impressive improvements since using Iconosquare. Aside from an increase in followers, engagement and reach have also improved as a result of the team being able to see and understand what resonates with their audience.

Engagement Analytics:

Based on past post performance, Kicker has successfully tailored their content and posting schedule to fit the needs of their audience better.

As a result, they’ve seen a tremendous growth in followers of 50%.

Competitor Tracking:

Using Competitor Tracking, the team can understand the competitive landscape at a macro level, break it down even further to get more detail on what’s working and what’s not and then explain this to stakeholders.

“It's showing me in one fell swoop what’s working for my competition, while establishing benchmarks by the genre of the post across the industry, instead of inaccurately lumping every post into one big bucket.” Bill Braun, Social Media at Kicker

Kicker has been using Iconosquare for well over a year now. In addition to seeing improved engagement rates and audience growth, the team has found it invaluable to be able to clearly see and understand why exactly they’ve improved. In the words of Bill Braun, Social Media at Kicker: “The time saved trying to understand success and failures, where they are occurring and why has meant Iconosquare has paid for itself ad infinitum.”

As Kicker continues to increase their engagement and reach, the team is excited to “continue to peel back the layers of Iconosquare and find (and use!) the potential.”

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