The Problem
My colleague and I were growing an Instagram for her pup as a side project to learn more about social media and marketing. We quickly found out that most websites, especially free ones, used to track social media growth would only enter new data entries if they were manually triggered to by a user. We wanted a more automated way to track daily and monthly growth and projections.
I was already using Google Sheets to track growth for my own personal Instagram, which you can read about in my blog post Instagram Analytics with Google Sheets.
Visualizing the Data
Since Google Sheets was doing most of the heavy lifting, we just needed to fetch and display the data in a useful manner, so that it was easier to process the data. A table was used to display the data for the recent 30 entries and had our averages and projections also shown. We used charts/graphs to easily see and compare the daily data. The most recent Instagram posts were also displayed with their amount of likes and comments to see engagement across each post.
Conclusion
This was a fun side project and I learned a lot about social media. The project was also completely free since it is currently hosted on Netlify and the data is provided from Google Sheets. One foreseeable problem is that the script being used on the Google Sheets spreadsheet can stop working at any time because it is reliant on Instagram's code.