What is Instagram Engagement?
By Instagram engagement, 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 on 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 is 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 straightforward 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 of 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.
How to Increase Instagram Engagement 2024
There are several tactics to use to increase your Instagram engagement organically, meaning your engagement you do not have to pay for such as boosted posts and ads.
✅ Utilize Instagram Stories
Instagram stories have the power to generate lots of engagement especially if you utilize all the stickers that Instagram offers.
Instagram offers a few stickers that can drive engagement. Some of the stickers include customizable quizzes, polls, emoji sliders, locations, add yours, AI stickers, product tags, and mentions. Instagram has also added the ability to add a link button to your Stories, which is a great way to drive traffic to your website or a landing page.
✅ 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 their 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.
✅ Post Relevant Memes
Memes make people giggle and can bring more comments or interactions with the post. For example, spinning a meme that reflects well with your industry can urge people to comment or reshare it.
While you can’t rely on only memes to boost your engagement, if one of your videos goes “viral” this helps your visibility and reach grow.
✅ Post Carousel Photos
Carousel photos are a great way to increase your engagement on Instagram. By choosing a carousel post over a single image post you can not only incorporate much more information but you can also dedicate an entire slide of photos for a call to action to clearly state what you would like your audience to do with your information.
✅ Timing
A common error amongst users is 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 outside of office hours. In Metricool we show you which is the best time for you to post.
✅ Engage With Your Audience
By replying to your comments, you are not only strengthening your relationship with your followers, but new users will be more inclined to comment if they see that you reply.
Metricool makes replying to messages and comments easy using our Inbox feature. This helps you organize all of your messages and comments in one place.
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 the 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.), the formula above takes 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.
What is a Good Engagement Rate on Instagram?
A good engagement rate on Instagram is considered to be between 1-5%. The more followers that you have, the harder it is to receive the higher end of this rate.
Does Scheduling Instagram Posts Affect Engagement?
The answer is no! It has been found that scheduling Instagram posts does not affect engagement negatively.
It is the complete opposite. Years of experience in this field have shown us that scheduling posts for Instagram and other social media channels has many benefits, that have increased both impressions and engagement.
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.
