It’s a few weeks before the end of the year… Which means you may start to see your friends sharing a collage image on their Instagram feeds with the hashtag #TopNine.

The app is called TOP NINE (update, the developers sold the app and now you can find it here: Creator Kit - Top Nine) , and it’s is a tool that shows you your nine most-liked Instagram photos of the year and then arranges them into a simple square collage that you can share with friends and family. It’s a fun way to reminisce about the past year and see what your friends have liked the most from your Instagram.

It’s great for marketers to check out too because it gives some insight into what type of social media content works the best on your Instagram page. Granted, I am a big advocate for continuously checking Instagram reporting every month so you know what content is working all of the time – not just once a year.

So instead of using the app, I just look at my Instagram Insights (which are only available for Instagram business pages...and if you market your product or service at all using Instagram, I definitely recommend getting a business page). Here, I am able to look at the content that has gotten the most engagement over the past year, the most clicks over to my website (super important for any brand), and – one of my favorites – the content that has received the most comments over the past year. This is important to me because social media is really all about the community. Not just the likes.

My Instagram top nine from 2018 (plus a few extra because that’s what insights shows you)

As you can see, there are definitely some social media trends here.

Images of myself, when I get a little personal, and images of wine tend to get the best engagement and the most comments from my community online, which really isn’t that shocking because many of the friends I made throughout the last 10 years are part of the wine industry. Or, at least they love wine! ❤️😂

This has been a trend for many of the brands that I work with as well – when you become a little more personal on your social media accounts, people get excited to know more about you. It’s the “know-like-trust” factor. By seeing someone online being authentic (which provides a chance to get to know them), some people will start liking what they have to say, which then turns into trust.

It’s definitely essential to any branding for a business. It’s why many people go out of their way to a certain Starbucks – because they like the baristas at the one that’s 15 miles away from their house better than the ones at the Starbucks that’s one mile away.

What you can do with the insight from your Instagram top nine

Take a look at what your top nine most liked/commented images from Instagram are. Compare them to your top nine from Facebook by going into your Facebook Insights and checking out what the top pieces of content are from the last year (if you haven’t been continuously reporting, it might be a bit more difficult to go through everything, but you can see what has received the most engagement in Insights).

Are you seeing any shared trends between the two platforms? Are you noticing more product-focused content doing well on Facebook and more personal stuff on Instagram? Or maybe the opposite? On which social platform do you get the best engagement?  

Action Item: Create a social media plan based on insights from your Instagram Top Nine

Take a look at some of this information and let that form a new strategy for the upcoming year. Maybe you see that your Instagram engagement is three times greater than Facebook, so you decide to do more Instagram stories, more videos, and more advertising on Instagram! Or maybe your brand still has really good engagement on Facebook – and there aren’t that many pages that still do because to Facebook’s changes, to organic reach, but we all know that there is still a whole lot of Facebook content that’s getting shared every day, so it’s coming from somewhere, haha!

If you are stuck with creating a game plan for social media, connect with me to talk strategy, or check out my Recipe for Instagram course which includes an entire lesson all about planning ahead.