Analyzing Old Contents that Have Potential to be Viral If Reposted.

Written by Yudhis
on June 2, 2019

The easiest way to assess a good content is to look at the number of likes & the comments .

If a content gets a lot of likes and comments, it means that the content has good quality and proven liked by many.

However, this approachis not suitable to analyze old contents.

Why? Because there is a difference in the amount of followers and Instagram algorithms when the content is posted.

The amount of followers will surely affect the amount of likes you’ll get. And we can't figure out how many followers of that Instagram account when the content posted, let say 1 or 2 years ago.

Therefore, one of the ways we can use is by comparing the amount of interactions of one content with others in the same time period.

We can do it easily with one of Virol's features: Post Performace.

Accessing Post Performance Feature

  • Open the Instagram account you want to analyze
  • Run Insights feature
  • Click on the analytics menu on the left of your screen.
  • Scroll down and find the post Performance chart

In this chart you will see a variety of dot spreads in yellow and blue areas.

Dots

  • Dots in the chart describes a post in a period of time with some amount of interaction.
  • The Dot color describes the post type. Blue for photo, orange for video, red for album/carousel, purple for IGTV.
  • Hover your mouse over each dot to see a preview of the photo/video. Click on the dot to open the Instagram page.

Dot location

  • X-Axis (horizontal) is the time period. The more to the right, the more recent the posting time.
  • Y-Axis (vertical) is the amount of likes and comments The higher the dots, the more amount of interactions the content got.

Area

  • The Black line is moving average. it is the average interactions of previous 30 posts.
  • Blue Area (standard deviation) is the area of posts with normal amount of interactions.
  • Yellow Area (Standard deviation ± 2) is the area of posts which has twice amount of interaction better or worse than normal.

Notes:

Standart Deviation is one of statictics formulas to determine the normal range of data spread. You can learn more in this article.

How to interpret Data and Chart

To use this chart, you don't have to be dizzy with the above terms or find out where the calculation is from.

Just look at the position where the point resides.

Posts located at:

  • The Blue Area is a post with a normal range of interactions. Not good, also not bad. It just normal.
  • Area + 2 Standart deviation (yellow area above the black line) is a post which performs 2x better than normal range.
  • Area-2 standard deviation (The yellow area below the black line) is a post which performs 2x worse than normal range.
  • Above (outside) The yellow area is an abnormal post, this is a potentially viral post.

The underline is, the higher the dots from the average line (black line), the better its performance.

Case studies

When I research content for my Islamic niche Instagram account, I found an old content in an Instagram account with its post performance analysis as follows.

If you see in the graph, the interaction of that post is indeed not as many as its latest posts. But if you see its position, the dot resembling the post is located above the yellow area, which means it has great potential to be viral.

Then I reposted the post to my Instagram account with a more appropriate hashtag and in the effective time (where my followers are active on Instagram).

The result is, that repost went3x times more viralthan its original.