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What is Instagram Engagement?
By Instagram engagement rate, we’re talking about your follower’s loyalty level within this social network.
It’s not about the number of fans that your profile has but about the degree of involvement, interest and interaction that your Instagram followers show towards your photos, videos, Instagram stories, Reels or any other content.
If you are a social media manager, you might be familiar with the following situation:
Some networks offer their users analysis tools to measure the success of a given campaign. On the other hand, quantifying engagement in Instagram is not so easy.
How to Calculate Your Instagram Engagement Rate
Interactions include different actions: how many people have visited your profile, how many have clicked on the link in your biography, how many have asked for directions to your company (if you have included an address), likes, saves, comments, etc.
Here are the most outstanding actions
Followers
It might sound obvious, but monitoring the exponential growth of your followers in any social network, and also analyzing how frequently you gain new fans, is crucial.
Many social network and digital marketing specialists consider that if these numbers don’t increase over time, your presence on Instagram is irrelevant.
So, always keep this factor in mind.
Likes
Another fundamental factor that it’s sometimes overlooked. It’s critical to monitor how many likes a publication receives, and then compare this result with other posts and also with the number of followers of your account.
This straight forward equation is a great indicator of the health and popularity of your profile.
Comments
Once we have gone through the essential steps, let’s review something a bit more complex. An analysis about the comments received by each post will help to measure the level of your follower’s engagement.
Even though understanding like rates might help you have an idea about how successful a publication is, comments will indicate with better certainty, the level of engagement. Liking a post takes one second but spending some time on writing a comment will be a better sign of users’ involvement.
Other Factors that Affect Instagram Engagement
✅ Popular Hashtags
Using popular Hashtags on your publications can benefit Instagram engagement and you could probably reach a higher number of followers.
Posts accompanied by Hashtags will show better engagement and also, these posts will be more accessible to the general public.
Analyzing which Hashtags are more popular beforehand and creating a list with them, will help you determine which ones are more convenient for your posts. In this social network, Hashtags serve as keywords to optimize searching.
In summary, Instagram is a platform that promotes the combined use of Hashtags and as we said earlier, users will be able to create a list with the favorite ones. Also, it’d be a smart thing to do considering all this collected info when you’re uploading new content. The popularity of a specific Hashtag will also reveal the kind of topics that followers are more interested in.
✅ Timing
A common error amongst users it not paying enough attention to the times when they upload their content. Think about it, why should we work hard to get quality and interesting content for followers when we end up publishing it at times that will be practically invisible to our audience? It makes no sense. So then, how can we know which times are best to post?
For many users, visiting the profile of their favorite brands is a matter of leisure not business so this means that people will probably visit their social networks out of office hours. In Metricool we show you which is the best time for you to post.
✅ Image Sizes on Instagram
The image sizes on your publications also affect the engagement rate in an indirect way. Posting a pixelated photo or stock image is worse than using your own image with the right dimensions and branding.
To avoid mistakes when you are uploading your images you can find the Instagram Photo Size Guide here.
Instagram Engagement Rate Formula
With the interaction data collected, you can start applying the engagement formula. There are different types of formulas. Here are two formulas:
Classic engagement formula
This formula is used for business accounts, because it takes reach into account. Reach data is a private metric, so it’s useful if you have a business account.
It can be used either to measure the engagement of Instagram posts or the account engagement. If you want to measure the data of a publication the calculation would be easy.
As you can see, this formula uses 100 as the multiplier.
Metricool engagement formula
Here at Metricool we multiply data by 1000 instead of 100. The reasoning behind this is to have more detailed data, since this percentage can exceed 100%.
On the other hand, some larger accounts would have percentages close to 0%, since generally the greater number of followers, the lower the engagement.
Let’s give an example to calculate your engagement in a company account publication:
▶️ 101 likes + 18 comments + 10 saved images= 129
▶️ Now you divide it by the scope of that publication [790 in reach] = 0.163
▶️ And finally you multiply by 1000
The data of your Instagram engagement for that publication would be= 163
Engagement formula for personal accounts and creators
To calculate the engagement of any account (personal, competitors, brands, creators etc.) is used the formula above but taking into account only the likes + comments divided by the number of followers of that account and multiplied by one thousand.
If we apply the previous example in this case the formula to measure engagement would be:
101 likes + 18 comments =119/ 1728 (followers) = 0.0688 x 1000 = 68.86
Instagram Engagement Rate Calculator
At Metricool, we know that managing complex analytic data can be exhausting and difficult, that’s why we offer a measurement of the current situation of your content in a new and more intuitive way.
If you want to calculate the engagement on Instagram, we will make it so easy for you. Sign up for free on metricool and calculate now your Instagram engagement rate.