How to Do an Instagram Audit

Feeling like your Instagram efforts are falling flat, or just not sure if what you're posting is actually connecting with your audience? An Instagram audit is the single best way to figure out what’s working, what’s not, and how to get your account back on track toward your goals. This step-by-step guide will walk you through a complete audit, from defining your objectives to analyzing your content, so you can stop guessing and start seeing real results.

What Exactly Is an Instagram Audit?

Think of an Instagram audit as a health check for your account. It’s a systematic review of your entire profile - from your bio and visuals to your content performance and audience demographics. The point isn’t to nitpick every post but to get a clear, data-informed picture of your current strategy. It helps you spot gaps, find new opportunities, and make deliberate choices that align with what you want to achieve.

Regular audits, or at least one thorough review every quarter, can help you:

• Gain Clarity: Understand what type of content resonates most with your followers.
• Refine Your Strategy: Move from a “post and pray” approach to a strategy grounded in real data.
• Improve Engagement: Learn how to create content that your audience actually wants to interact with.
• Boost Growth: Attract the right kind of followers who are genuinely interested in what you have to say.

Step 1: Set Your Goals (Or Revisit Them)

Before you look at a single metric, you need to know what you’re measuring against. Without clear goals, analytics are just numbers on a screen. Every decision you make during your audit should be filtered through the lens of what you want Instagram to do for your brand or business.

What are you trying to accomplish? Pick one or two primary goals to focus on:

• Brand Awareness: Getting your name, product, or service in front of more of the right people. Key metrics here are Reach and Impressions.
• Community Engagement: Building a loyal audience that actively participates in conversations. Focus on Likes, Comments, Shares, and Saves.
• Website Traffic: Driving followers from Instagram to your website, blog, or online store. This is all about Link Clicks.
• Lead Generation or Sales: Turning followers into leads or customers directly from the platform. Look at clicks on shopping links, sticker taps in Stories, or direct messages asking for info.

Write your top goal down. This will be your north star for the entire audit process.

Step 2: Give Your Profile a First-Impression Checkup

Your profile is the first thing a potential follower sees. It needs to tell them who you are, what you do, and why they should care, all within a few seconds. Let's break it down piece by piece.

Profile Picture

Is your profile photo high-quality and easily recognizable, even as a small circle? For brands, this should almost always be your logo. For personal brands, it should be a clear, professional headshot where your face is visible.

Username (@handle)

Is it simple, memorable, and directly related to your brand name? Avoid using too many numbers or underscores, as they can make your handle harder to remember and search for.

Name Field

This is different from your username. Your Name field is searchable on Instagram, so make it work for you! Instead of just your brand name, consider adding a keyword that describes what you do. For example, instead of just "Oak & Dale," use "Oak & Dale | Custom Woodworking."

The Bio

Your bio is your elevator pitch. It needs to quickly communicate three things:

1. Who you are and what you do.
2. What kind of value you provide (e.g., “helping you build furniture” or “daily style inspiration”).
3. A clear call-to-action (CTA) telling people what to do next.

A weak bio says, “Lifestyle & travel. Lover of coffee.” A strong bio says, “Guiding busy professionals on mindful travel | 👇 Get my free weekend travel planner.”

Link in Bio

First, test your link. Does it work? Does it direct users to a mobile-friendly page? If you have multiple links to promote, use a link hub tool. Your CTA in the bio should clearly point people to this link.

Story Highlights

Highlights are your chance to save your best Stories and organize them for new visitors. Are yours useful? Think about categories like "About Us," "FAQs," "Testimonials," "How to Order," or a showcase of your best products. Make sure your Highlight covers are on-brand and create a clean, uniform look.

Step 3: Get to Know Your Audience

Just having a lot of followers means nothing if they're not the right people. Head to your Instagram Insights (Profile > Professional Dashboard > View All Insights > Total Followers) and take a serious look at who is following you.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Demographics: Look at the breakdown of age range, gender, and top locations (cities and countries). Does this line up with your target customer or ideal audience? If you’re a local business in Austin, Texas, but most of your followers are in Mumbai, you have a problem.
• Follower Growth: Scroll down to see your follower growth over the last 30 or 90 days. Is it trending up, down, or flat? Were there any sudden spikes or drops? Try to align those dates with specific posts or campaigns to see what caused the change. Did a Reel go viral? Did you run a giveaway?
• Most Active Times: Find out which days and hours your audience is most active on Instagram. This is an absolute goldmine. If your followers are most active on weekdays at 6 PM, but you're posting at 9 AM, you're missing out on a huge wave of initial engagement.

Step 4: Audit Your Content Performance

This is where the magic happens. It’s time to move beyond vanity metrics and understand which content is actually working toward your goals. We'll break this down by content type.

Open up your Instagram Insights and look at your content from the last 30-90 days. For each content category, filter your posts by different metrics depending on your goal from Step 1.

If Your Goal is Brand Awareness…

Go to your posts and Reels and filter them by Reach. What are your Top 3-5 posts? What do they have in common?

• Format: Were they Reels with trending audio? Relatable memes? In-depth carousels?
• Topic: What were they about? Was it a behind-the-scenes look, an educational tip, or a product feature?
• Cover Image/Hook: What did the first 3 seconds of the Reel show? What was the cover photo like? Did it grab attention?

Now, do the same thing and look at your posts with the lowest Reach. Why do you think they flopped? Be honest with yourself and look for patterns. Maybe those text-heavy graphics just aren't cutting it.

If Your Goal is Community Engagement…

Filter your posts by Likes, Comments, Shares, and especially Saves. Saves are a powerful indicator that your content was so valuable someone wanted to come back to it later. It's a huge signal to the Instagram algorithm.

Identify your top posts for engagement. Ask yourself:

• Did I ask a question? Captions that encourage a response tend to get more comments.
• Was it a carousel? Carousel posts that teach something often get a lot of saves.
• Was it relatable? Memes, quotes, and highly relatable experiences get a lot of shares.
• Was there a person in it? Photos and videos with human faces tend to perform better than those without.

Your most-saved content is a roadmap for what to create next.

If Your Goal is Website Traffic…

You’ll be looking primarily at your Instagram Stories Insights (for swipe-up links or link sticker taps) and a tool like Google Analytics to track traffic from your link in bio.

In your Stories, look for what types of content prompts people to click. Was it a direct product promotion with a "Shop Now" sticker, or a more subtle mention that sent people to a blog post? This will help you refine your CTA strategy.

Step 5: Review Your Aesthetics and Brand Voice

Your Instagram feed should feel cohesive and visually represent your brand at a glance. Consistency is everything.

Visuals &, Grid Layout

Quickly scroll through your 9-12 most recent posts. Does your feed look consistent, or is it a random collection of images and videos? Things to look for:

• Color Palette: Are you using your brand colors consistently?
• Filters &, Editing: Do you use the same preset or editing style on most of your photos?
• Fonts: Do you use consistent fonts and branding on your graphic templates?

Your grid doesn't have to be perfect, but it should feel like it belongs to the same brand. If it looks chaotic, it might be time to create some simple templates or a visual style guide.

Brand Voice &, Tone

Now, read the captions from your last 10 posts aloud. Do they sound like they were written by the same person (or brand)? Is the tone consistent - is it funny, inspiring, educational, or professional? If your captions swing from overly formal to using slang and emojis, it can confuse your audience. Define your brand voice and stick to it.

Hashtag Strategy

Are your hashtags helping or hurting? It’s not about using 30 generic tags like #love and #business. A good strategy includes a mix of:

• Broad/Community hashtags: Connects you to a larger community (e.g., #socialmediamarketing).
• Niche hashtags: Targets a more specific audience (e.g., #smallbizsocialtips).
• Branded hashtags: Specific to your brand or a campaign (e.g., #YourBrandName).

Check your hashtags to make sure none of them are banned or broken. Banned hashtags can severely limit your reach.

Step 6: Create Your Action Plan

An audit is pointless without action. Now that you've gathered all this information, it's time to build a plan for what to do next. Create a simple document with three columns: Keep, Tweak, and Ditch.

• Keep: What’s working well and gets great results? Do more of this!
  • Example: "Carousel posts on Topic X get the most saves. Create one per week."
• Tweak: What has potential but isn't quite hitting the mark? How can you improve it?
  • Example: "Our Reels have a good hook but poor watch time. Tweak the editing to be faster." "Our bio is good, but the CTA could be stronger."
• Ditch: What is consistently underperforming and wasting your time?
  • Example: "Graphic-only quotes get almost no engagement. Stop making them." "Posting on Sunday mornings doesn't work for my audience. Ditch that time slot."

This simple framework turns pages of notes into a clear, actionable strategy you can implement right away.

Final Thoughts

Doing a thorough Instagram audit is the most empowering thing you can do for your social media strategy. This process gives you a clear and honest look at your account, allowing you to build a content plan based on what your audience truly wants, not on what you think they want.

We know that tracking performance across different content types and planning a new strategy can feel messy. At Postbase, we designed our analytics dashboard to make spotting your top-performing Reels, posts, and Stories incredibly simple so you can stop digging through native apps. Once you've identified what works, our visual calendar makes it easy to schedule your new, data-driven content across all your platforms without missing a beat.