30 Day Derby Street Shops Analysis (IG)

Since I’m currently working on the social media marketing team for Derby Street Shops, I wanted to analyze a brand I actively manage and work with rather than relying on hypothetical or publicly available data. With an established Instagram presence of approximately 24k+ followers, Derby Street Shops offers a strong case study for evaluating how organic and paid social media strategies perform within a community-driven retail environment.

For this analysis, I focused exclusively on Instagram and reviewed performance from the past 30 days, which also aligns similarly to when I joined the team. This timeframe allowed me to assess recent content decisions, audience behavior, and performance trends using Iconosquare, an analytics platform comparable to Sprout Social and Hootsuite, alongside Instagram Insights and Meta reporting. 

While I have experience using Sprout Social in previous roles, Iconosquare provided deeper visibility into post-level performance, engagement trends, audience activity, and optimal posting times, making it especially valuable for this evaluation. Overall, this analysis looks at how consistency, storytelling, and data-informed decisions shape organic reach and engagement, especially within today’s algorithm-driven social landscape.

Performance Overview

Over the past 30 days, Derby Street Shops published five evenly spaced feed posts that generated over 83k+ impressions and views, reflecting a 7.51% increase from the previous month. While overall reach increased, engagement rates were slightly lower than average. One contributing factor was a noticeable decrease in Instagram Stories during this period, which typically play a key role in driving interaction and maintaining visibility.

Iconosquare data showed clear spikes in reach and impressions during boosted periods, confirming that paid amplification successfully expanded visibility. However, average engagement per post dipped slightly, reinforcing the importance of pairing reach-driven efforts with consistent community touchpoints such as Stories and interactive formats.

While Reels historically perform best for Derby Street Shops in terms of organic reach, this 30-day period revealed a shift. Based on average reach by post type, carousel posts outperformed Reels, highlighting how performance trends can evolve depending on content context, messaging, and campaign goals.

Key Trends & Insights

A few clear trends stood out during this analysis:

• Higher reach did not always correlate with higher engagement, particularly during periods with reduced Story activity

• Carousel and static content outperformed Reel formats when paired with strong storytelling and clear intent

• Paid and organic strategies were most effective when used together, especially when organic content established interest before amplification

• Engagement spikes aligned more closely with specific posts rather than overall posting frequency

These findings reinforce the idea that relevance and interaction play a greater role in performance than volume alone. As noted in Sprout Social’s article on social media algorithms, “social media algorithms prioritize content based on how users interact with it,” meaning early engagement signals play a major role in determining visibility.

Spotlight: Boosted Post Driving App Downloads

One of the strongest examples from this period was a boosted static teaser post that was designed to build excitement around a new tenant while driving app downloads. Rather than immediately revealing the tenant, the post relied on curiosity-driven storytelling paired with a clear call to action: download the app to reveal the tenant.

Despite being a static image, the post generated over 50k+ impressions and achieved a strong engagement rate. Instagram Insights and Meta reporting showed that across two boost periods, the post drove significant profile activity and external link taps, making this a very successful post. The second boost, which ran for five days with a slightly larger budget, achieved a cost per website visit as low as $0.23 and generated over 1k+ link clicks. As a result, app downloads increased by more than 400% during the first week of the campaign.

This performance demonstrated that while Reels often dominate organic reach, strategic static content paired with intentional paid amplification can successfully drive measurable business outcomes. It also highlighted the value of using multiple analytics tools, as Instagram Insights provided clearer visibility into link-level actions than Iconosquare alone.

Strengths, Opportunities, & Strategic Direction

Derby Street Shop’s social media presence is grounded in a strong brand identity, elevated visuals, and a clear community focus tailored to a local audience of women ages 20-65+. The account effectively balances lifestyle content, trend participation, and tenant promotion, creating a consistent and recognizable presence that supports both engagement and discovery.

Recent analytics also surfaced a few focused opportunities to strengthen performance:

• Increase Story frequency to support engagement between feed posts

• Expand user generated content beyond Story reposts into feed-level content

• Encourage more interaction through prompts, comments and questions

• Introduce light recurring content series to strengthen storytelling continuity

Building on these insights, a more intentional organic strategy should continue to center around clear content pillars, lifestyle and experiential moments, community updates and events, tenant highlights, and trend-driven but brand-aligned posts. 

Data from Iconosquare, Instagram Insights, and Meta reporting supports pairing this structure with consistent posting, increased Story usage, and balanced calls to action. As demonstrated by the boosted teaser post, soft CTAs can drive engagement, while clear, conversion-focused prompts can successfully encourage actions such as app downloads. Together, these strategies help ensure engagement metrics support meaningful business outcomes rather than existing in isolation.

This 30-day Instagram analysis highlights how using data alongside creative intuition can strengthen a brand’s social media strategy. While engagement metrics reveal how audiences interact with content, conversion-focused KPIs demonstrate how that attention translates into meaningful action. By combining storytelling, consistency, community engagement, and strategic paid amplification, Derby Street Shops can continue to strengthen its Instagram presence while supporting broader business goals. Treating engagement as the foundation for conversion allows organic content to drive both visibility and long-term impact.

Hey, I’m Ashley!

I am a graphic & interactive designer passionate about creating purposeful, fun, and engaging design. Whether it’s a brand identity, a responsive website, or a social media campaign, I love connecting ideas with strategy to make work that’s not only beautiful, but effective.