How do you truly know if your content is reaching the right audience and connecting with them?
You could just keep track of how many followers you get every day but that wouldn’t be the best metric.
What you want to look at is your engagement rate as that shows whether or not your audience is actively following your content and taking actions with it.
Your engagement rate is important in the same way businesses care about customer reviews, you want to know if your audience is interested in what you’re doing and their opinion on it.
Table of Contents
- What is An Engagement Rate?
- Why Does Your Engagement Rate Matter?
- How Do I Calculate My Engagement Rate?
- What Are “Good” Engagement Rates?
- Online Tools That Calculate Your Engagement Rate For You
What is An Engagement Rate?
Engagement is measured by likes, shares, saves and comments on your Instagram post or Reel.
Your engagement rate is a key indicator of how well your audience is responding to your content.
If your followers are commenting, liking and sharing your content, your engagement rate will show it. You want to be able to understand the level of interaction you are seeing from your followers with each piece of content or over a period of time to understand what’s working best.
Why Does Your Engagement Rate Matter?
Your engagement rate is actually more important than your number of followers.
The reason your engagement rate matters so much is that it is an important factor in deciding whether or not your content appears in your followers’ Instagram feeds.
Though Instagram has remained relatively tight-lipped on how their algorithm works outside of some public announcements regarding safety, the team behind the algorithm held a press conference in 2018 outlining key factors behind what does and doesn’t make your IG feed:
Core Factors
- Interest: How much Instagram predicts you’ll care about a post, with higher ranking for what matters to you, determined by past behavior on similar content and potentially machine vision analyzing the actual content of the post.
- Recency: How recently the post was shared, with prioritization for timely posts over weeks-old ones.
- Relationship: How close you are to the person who shared it, with higher ranking for people you’ve interacted with a lot in the past on Instagram, such as by commenting on their posts or being tagged together in photos.
Other Considerations
- Frequency: How often you open Instagram, as it will try to show you the best posts since your last visit.
- Following: If you follow a lot of people, Instagram will be picking from a wider breadth of authors so you might see less of any specific person.
- Usage: How long you spend on Instagram determines if you’re just seeing the best posts during short sessions, or it’s digging deeper into its catalog if you spend more total time browsing.
If your followers are more likely to like, share or comment on your content, Instagram is much more likely to show that content to them more frequently as well as surface that content to their network of users as a recommended account or content in the Explore tab.
How Do I Calculate My Engagement Rate?
Now that you know the why behind your engagement, you’re probably wondering how it is calculated. Due to the definition, of an engagement rate, there’s a few different ways to define it:
By Followers: If you divide your total number of likes and comments by your follower count and then multiply that number by 100, you will have your engagement rate as a percentage.
Follower Engagement Rate = (Likes + Comments) Total Followers 100
By Impressions: If you divide your total number of likes and comments by your impressions and then multiply that number by 100, you will have your engagement rate as a percentage.
Impression Engagement Rate = (Likes + Comments) Total Impressions 100
By Interactions: If you divide your total number of likes and comments by your total reach and then multiply that number by 100, you will have your engagement rate as a percentage.
Impression Engagement Rate = (Likes + Comments) Total Reach 100
With these formulas, you can also calculate your engagement rate for a specific post or Reel or over a specific time period, like a week or a month.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you could also include shares and saves as engagement actions to add to your likes and comments but again, that is something up to you.
What Are “Good” Engagement Rates?
Some of you may be wondering: what is a good engagement rate for your pet influencer or pupfluencer account?
A 2018 report from Scrunch.com tells us that the average engagement rate on Instagram is between 1-3%.
Another study by influencer marketing solution provider Markerly found the following numbers regarding engagement rates amongst influencer accounts:
- < 1,000 followers average about 8% engagement
- 1,000 – 10,000 followers average 4% engagement
- 10,000 – 100,000 followers average 2.4% engagement
- 100,000 – 1 million followers average 1.8% engagement
- > 1 million followers average 1.7% engagement
Keep these percentages in mind as you get going and start to track your metrics.
If you notice that your engagement rate is high, that means that a large portion of the people who follow you are actively engaging with your content — you’re on to something!
On the flip side, if your engagement rate is low, it could mean a few things. Perhaps your content isn’t resonating with your followers, or you aren’t posting at the right time.
The biggest takeaway is to understand how you are calculating your engagement rate and ensuring you are consistent in the formula you pick so you can set goals to have the most engaged audience possible. Making sure you define your metrics and goals is your way to ensure your success.
Online Tools That Calculate Your Engagement Rate For You
The best way to calculate your engagement rate is to use Instagram’s Insights tools and do manual calculations right from the data source. For some though, that may be tiresome or a bit too much of a lift so here are a few tools you may be able to use:
- Inbeat’s Instagram Engagement Rate Calculator: Inbeat, a microinfluencer database provider, offers a free tool to calculate your engagement rate as well as a way to find similar influencers to your account.
- Phlanx’s Instgram Engagement Calculator: Phlanx, a marketing platform provider focused on influencer marketing, offers another engagement rate calculator that gives you a rough approximation based on what’s publicly available.
- Grin’s Instagram Engagement Calculator: Grin is another influencer marketing software provider with an engagement calculator. The one thing to note with their data is that their API access to Instagram appears to lag a bit and so it may not be providing the most up to date information.
As you continue to try to find the right amount of engaging content for your audience, always remember to keep track of the type of content (posts vs. Reel, funny vs. informational, etc.) that drives comments, likes, and shares. Even as your account gets bigger, you always want to make sure your content is as engaging as before.