What's a good engagement rate on Instagram?
Instagram, with over a billion monthly active users, is one of the most popular social networks for brands. After a few years marked by a frantic race for followers and likes, the trend has shifted towards a greater concern for brands to retain their audience through inspiring and authentic content.
This sincere content creates more interaction and therefore by definition more engagement.
But the bigger your audience gets, the harder it is to maintain a high rate of engagement.
Paradoxically, keeping a high engagement rate is one of the criteria of the Instagram algorithm to increase your visibility. It does seem like a snake biting its own tail. 😄
In this article, we will :
- Defining what engagement rate is
- Learn to calculate it
- Compare it to the Instagram average
- Beware of this number in influencer marketing
- Discover a consumer calculator
What is the engagement rate on Instagram?
The engagement rate on Instagram is probably the most important performance indicator to monitor. It is the one that informs the objective value of an account.
It is also one of the criteria used by the Instagram algorithm to increase or reduce the visibility of a publication. It is therefore essential to develop strategies to increase your engagement rate on Instagram or at least keep it at a good level.
The engagement rate is based on the total number of interactions with an Instagram account, whether it be on photos, videos or a carousel.
Possible interactions are:
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Saving publications (bookmarks)
However, most of the calculators on the market are based solely on the number of Likes and comments.
Even if the methods for calculating the commitment rate differ slightly, it is important to ensure that the calculation method is the same for all the accounts analyzed to homogenize the results.
Let's find out how to calculate it without further ado.
Calculation in relation to the number of subscribers
This is the method most frequently used on the internet.
- Divide the number of interactions (Likes and comments) by a representative number of posts. (For example, the last 30 posts)
- You will then get an average of interactions per post.
- Divide this number by your number of followers
- Multiply the result by 100
- Find out your current subscription rate.
Let us illustrate our demonstration with a concrete example.
Guillaume is an underwater photographer with 16,000 followers. He has an average of 350 likes and 12 comments on his last 30 posts. The average number of interactions on his page is 362. The following operation must then be performed: 362 / 16,000 x 100 = 2.26
Guillaume's page has an engagement rate of 2.26%, which is a fairly low score given his small number of subscribers.
If William wanted to compare himself to his competitors, he would have to apply this method to an equivalent number of posts (30 in our example).
Here is the formula to apply:
Caveat of this calculation
Although this is the most commonly used method, this type of calculation is flawed because it does not consider the fact that many of our page's subscribers never come into contact with the publication. To refine the result, another method has been developed. This one is based on the organic reach of publications.
Calculation in relation to the organic scope
For this formula, the calculation is based on the actual organic reach of the publications. In the same way as for the previous calculation, the number of interactions must be divided by the real organic reach.
To find this figure, you will have to go to the Statistics tab of the application and then click on Affected accounts. You will then have a figure at 7 days. You can adjust this figure to 14 days, 30 days or 90 days.
Please note that this calculation method is only available to people with an Instagram Business account.
The average engagement rate on Instagram
Instagram and TikTok have become the preferred social networks for influencers of all kinds because they are platforms that allow for visibility and generate a lot of user engagement.
As a comparison, an Instagram post generates 23 times more engagement than the same post on Facebook.
For an account looking to compare its performance to others, the average engagement rate on Instagram is 2.73%. This rather modest score is explained by the massive number of inactive accounts.
Engagement rates of your competitors on Instagram
If you want to estimate your position in your industry, you should compare your engagement rate with that of your competitors. It is important to take the same parameters into account in the calculation.
Some activities, especially in B2B, find it difficult to generate commitment. Don't be too hard on yourself. Especially look at whether your presence on Instagram is helping you acquire new customers.
To summarize the average engagement rate on Instagram, here's a graph that allows you to see where you stand in terms of your number of followers and your engagement rate.
If you're on top, you have our admiration. For the rest of us below, we'll give you 7 tips to increase your follower rate on Instagram.
Engagement rates and Influence marketing
It's hard to escape influencer marketing for brands. This relay has become an essential means of communication.
However, in influencer marketing you can find everything, very respectable agencies, others less so, professional micro-influencers and others fake, hyperactive communities and others non-existent, real figures and others falsified... It is therefore important to be wary.
Can you fake your engagement rate?
Of course, and many influencers do not hesitate to do so. Influencer marketing is a juicy business where monetization can pay off.
It is easy to falsify the engagement rate by buying massively the two criteria used in its calculation:
- Subscribers on the one hand,
- Interactions, on the other hand.
This can artificially inflate the engagement rate.
As I write this, I could order 10,000 followers for $63 but also 10,000 Likes for $30.
With such low rates, these purchases become a mere expense for the influencers that they deduct from their income.
It has become an essential issue for brands to verify the veracity of what is being advertised.
Here is the process to follow before making a deal with an influencer:
- Calculate your engagement rate
- Observe the progression curve of your subscribers. It should be fairly linear.
- Check the profile of about 30 subscribers
- Read a hundred comments to see if they are not automatic messages sent by robots
- Confirm the influencer's expertise on a subject by looking at their publications for a period of 2 weeks
Which tools to calculate your engagement rate on Instagram
The last stage of our journey into the land of engagement rates.
There are plenty of tools online to calculate your engagement rate on Instagram. After testing several of them, none of them gave me complete satisfaction.
That's why we asked our Tech teams to come up with one that is both easy to use and intuitive. Enter Kurato's engagement rate calculator.
You can audit up to 3 accounts per week for free in exchange for an email. 😊 We'll introduce you to our Kurato tool, but also full of tips to improve your results on Instagram.
Good luck 👍