What Content Works on Instagram?

Understanding what Content works on Instagram for your Handle/Brand or your competition is hard. Generally, you or your competition will be having 3–4 content themes that would get pushed simultaneously. As of today, if you need to find out what exactly is working for your competition or you, the process is very tedious😰.

1. Typically you will go to your/competitor’s Instagram page, keep on scrolling to check the various type of posts.
2. You will make mental models on what different types of post themes you have seen, what post themes have generated the max engagement, and so on.

Why do you need to know this?

1. While creating your next month’s content calendar, you can check what worked for you and also your competition and generate ideas.
2. This can be used to do an Audit for all your executed content plans and to understand what content works on Instagram for you.
3. Our friends in Social Media Agencies can use this information while pitching new ideas to their clients. Having a clear data-backed strategy always entices everyone.
4. Helps generate a lot of inspiration by looking at data from slightly unrelated sources(from other industries) which are serving the same target audiences.

How we at Predis.ai are trying to understand what content works on Instagram.

1. We have trained our AI to understand what content is being conveyed via the post and then group them in similar content themes.
2. These themes are then ordered according to their engagement and share of voice and hence giving a crystal clear view of the different strategies and more importantly strategies that are performing well.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Let us look at some Handles and check what inferences can we derive from them. We took the liberty to use these handles as they are popular in their niches. All of the data is pulled from the official Instagram APIs only.

Example 1: Neil Patel (246k followers)

These are how the content themes stand out!

Before we start, a quick explainer of what you are seeing in the video:

1. The AI has segregated all posts into similar content themes.
2. The Table has the following data points:

• Group: Name of the content group
• Representative Images: Some Images representing the content category.
• Share of voice: Share of voice is the percentage of posts a particular group has. Example: If Out of 100 total posts, 20 posts are about Jackets, then the Jackets group’s share of voice is 20%. It means 20% of the time you talk about Jackets.
• Total Posts: Total number of posts in the category
• Engagement %: This shows how many followers engaged with this group out of your total follower base. You can also see the relative difference between the category’s engagement and the average engagement of your handle. Higher the Engagement, better the category
• Avg. Eng: Average comments+Likes on the posts in this category

3. In case the video does not play automatically, please click on the play button.

We can understand the following:

The highest Engagement comes from Personal pictures.

2. His least engaging content is when he posts infographics. Note that they generate almost one-fifth of the engagement his top-performing category gets.

The least Engagement is generated in Knowledge/Motivational Infographics

Example 2: BeerBiceps (1.4M followers)

This is how the content themes look like. You might want to look at this before checking the video. Please play the video in case it does not autoplay.

As you can see, we can easily understand the following things from our AI’s analysis:

1. The highest performing category for BeerBiceps is when he puts in his family photos. We think that is because the audience always wants to see the personal/humane side of influencers and hence this works.
2. The second-highest performing category is where he is showcasing his bodybuilding skills. The images look really good for sure and more importantly, the message it conveys is well appreciated by the users.

The highest Engagement comes from Personal pictures.

3. Let us look at what content does not perform relatively well for Beerbiceps. As you see, infographics — posts with captions generate almost 2% lesser engagement than the highest performing posts. This means that BeerBiceps will benefit from having more posts from the top-performing categories.

The least performing contents are Motivational quotes/infographics.

Example 3: Mumbai Indians (7.1M followers)

This is how the content themes play out. We can understand the following things:

1. Mumbai Indians fans engage the most when they see behind-the-scenes images of their team. This is evident in the top 2 performing content categories.

Behind-the-scenes is the best engagement generator

2. The least performing categories are those where the handle shares collaboration announcements/infographics etc. More important to note is that these generate just One-Fifth of the engagement generated by the highest performing categories.

Announcements are the least engaging content.

There is obviously one major limitation in the analysis. Our AI works only with Images as of now. However, we believe that it still gives a good enough trend.

Does this make sense for you?

We would be happy to chat about :

1. Is there any other data point that can be added?
2. Are there any improvements which can be done
3. Anything and Everything else you might want to talk about.

Do reach out to us to chat about this. You can click here to try this out for your handles too!

Meanwhile, you can check our other blogs here.