How to Calculate Engagement Rate on Instagram

Coming to terms with a digital world means coming to terms with new terminology. 

A lot of us like to think we’re “down with the kids” and know everything about being online, but a lot of us also need to put our egos aside and let the younger generations teach us something for a change. 

Today’s term in question is engagement rate and, more importantly, how to calculate engagement rate on Instagram.

As we are all aware, social media presents many job opportunities for a lot of people. Influencers are now an integral part of society and the number of aspiring content creators is growing by the day. But being a content creator is no longer just about posting cool content for your followers to see, and, instead, is now all about the numbers. 

A creator’s engagement rate is among the most important of these numbers and can be the difference between someone landing multiple job opportunities and someone sitting around wondering when their time will come. 

To become the former, you’re going to need to know everything about engagement rates. Lucky for you, we just so happen to know quite a bit about them. Keep reading to find out all about the magic number that could propel you to Insta success!

Engagement rate: the basics

To answer the burning question that has all of you in a chokehold, your Instagram engagement rate is a social media marketing metric that measures the amount of interaction a piece (or pieces) of content receives in relation to follower count. 

For those of you already familiar with the creatorsphere, we’re sure the term ‘engagement’ is one that you’ve seen floating around. On Instagram, engagement can take on many forms:

1. Likes
2. Comments
3. Shares
4. Saves
5. Reactions
6. Direct messages
7. Mentions
8. Click-throughs
9. Clicks
10. Profile visits
11. Replies
12. Regrams
13. Link clicks
14. Sticker taps
15. Use of branded hashtags 

These are what contribute to your engagement rate.

While follower growth is great, it doesn’t mean much if your audience doesn’t care about your content. Once you know how to calculate the engagement rate on Instagram (which we will touch on further down), your mindset will shift to creating resonating content that encourages the aforementioned metrics. 

Calculating your engagement rate

So you’ve started creating content with engagement in mind, but how do you take your new numbers and turn them into your post’s engagement rate?

There are several ways to do this: 

Formula #1 – engagement by followers:

Engagement rate = (likes+comments) / total number of followers X 100

While this will give you the engagement rate of a single post, brands will often perform an overall calculation of entire profiles to ensure that one good post isn’t just a fluke. This is done by finding the average engagement rate over a minimum of 10 different posts. 

Formula #2 – engagement by impressions:

Engagement = (likes+comments+saves) / impressions X 100

Because this formula takes into account the number of people who actually saw your post and interacted with it, it gives you more accurate insights into your performance.

Formula #3 – factored Instagram engagement rate:

Some marketers may value some metrics above others. For example, if they see comments as more valuable than saves, more weight will be put on the comments; resulting in a formula that could look something like this:

Engagement = [(comments x2) + other interactions] / impressions X 100

Remember: this formula can be highly deceptive which is why it is the least common among them all. 

What is considered good engagement rate?

So, now you know how to calculate engagement rate on Instagram, what numbers should you be aiming for?

The answer is, it depends.

What’s considered good engagement rate from a food influencer with 100k followers could be equivalent to good engagement rate from a health and fitness influencer with 20k followers. 

We know that’s not really helpful, so let us break it down for you by looking at average engagement rate instead. 

Most social media experts agree that good engagement rate is anywhere between 1% – 5%, but the more followers you have, the harder this is to achieve. Among the influencer community, micro influencers tend to be those who are hitting these figures effortlessly due to their smaller, more concentrated and engaged audiences. This is why we are seeing a shift in brands looking to collaborate with micro influencers over mega influencers more often, as they know their content will receive more engagement.

 

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A post shared by MOLLY MAY WREN (@mollymaywren)

Later analysed millions of accounts and found that between this 1%-5% buffer zone, 2.88% is the average engagement rate of a Feed post on Instagram. 

To break this down even further, they concluded the following average engagement rates for each post type:

Carousel – 3.11%                        Image – 2.76%                                   Video – 2.60% 

Looking at the data, Carousels are a great way to improve your engagement rate.

FAQ’s

How do you calculate the engagement rate?

To calculate your engagement rate, add up the total number of likes and comments, divide this by the number of followers you have and then multiply that number by 100. This will calculate the engagement rate of one post. 

What is considered a good engagement rate?

On Instagram, a good engagement rate can be anywhere between 1%-5%, with 2.88% being the average as of 2022. 

Our Influencer marketing agency and Social agency are located worldwide, with our agency network based in the USA, UK, UAE and China.

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@ Socially Powerful

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