Instagram has turned into the favorite social media site for popular brands and will remain so for a very long time to come!
One of the reasons for this platform’s undiminished popularity year after year is the high levels of engagement opportunities it provides.
Look at this infographic below to understand what factors influence engagement rates on Instagram.
Regardless of whether you’re a brand, an influencer, or an individual who has just started, you can leverage Instagram’s engagement rates to reach unprecedented heights!
But, assessing your Instagram engagement rate might be a very challenging task to accomplish.
Should the number of times your post was saved be considered “engagement”? What about the debate over followers vs. impressions? What provides a better overall picture of your account’s engagement rate? Is there an Instagram engagement calculator?
To address all these issues, we have put together methods by which you can manually calculate your Instagram account’s engagement rate (and an alternative solution if mental math gymnastics is not your thing.) Keep reading to learn all about it.
What is Instagram’s Engagement Rate?
In a nutshell, your Instagram engagement rate for a specific post is the total number of your post’s likes and comments divided by your account’s total number of followers (more on this later).
Engagement rates are critical metrics to track because they show how frequently your audience engages with your content. They push you to focus on relevant account stats instead of vanity metrics (such as only the number of likes your posts get).
What is the Importance of Measuring Your Instagram Engagement Rate?
The value of knowing your engagement rate on Instagram extends well beyond gloating over the number of likes any of your posts receive.
High engagement on Instagram accords more reputation to your account on the platform. Any account with a lot of likes, comments, and followers will be perceived as more authoritative by your current audience and potential followers.
Curating higher levels of engagement is also one of the most influential and successful strategies followed by companies to establish their brand identity. As followers connect with your brand on Instagram daily, they may quickly become devoted consumers who end up supporting your business both online and offline.
Meanwhile, if you’re an individual, marketers may notice your strong engagement and instantly see you as the authority in your sector, which is pertinent if you aim to be an Instagram influencer.
Establishing yourself as the platform’s authority will make it simpler to get more outstanding collaborations with other top-tier influencers and businesses.
What is a Good Engagement Rate on Instagram?
Before we dive head-on into the parameters of gauging engagement rates on Instagram, let’s get one thing straight: there is no such thing as a uniformly “good” engagement rate. Several factors determine ideal engagement rates; therefore, there is no “one size fits all” answer.
You may examine various engagement rates and use those figures to determine how your engagement metrics fare in comparison.
Instagram’s typical engagement rate for posts ranges between 1% and 5%. Of course, engagement rates are always loosely correlated with an account’s follower count.
If you want to know the typical engagement rates in your niche, you’ll need to conduct some research, but the range above serves as a fair, average reference point. Bear this range in mind while going ahead and the fact that it is not fixed in stone. For instance, if your engagement rate is 0.85 percent, you’re doing quite well.
Of course, you would want to shoot for the stars. In most circumstances, you should expect an engagement rate of 1-3 percent. An engagement rate of 5% or above indicates a very high level of engagement.
What Are The Problems With Calculating The Instagram Engagement Rate?
How is the Instagram engagement rate calculated? It’s a simple question with a convoluted solution.
Most Instagrammers would split their engagement by either their followers or impressions to calculate their Instagram engagement rate.
So, what’s the bone of contention?
The issue is that there are numerous methods for determining the Instagram engagement rate. And as for the “best” way… well, it all depends on who you ask!
Let’s begin with the engagement part first.
While most people evaluate engagement by tallying the total number of likes and comments, some argue that the number of times a post was saved should also be included. There’s also the never-ending debate over whether comments and likes should be regarded equally. In other words, is one like equal to one comment in terms of the value of engagement?
This comes up a lot because some accounts receive thousands of likes but just a few hundred comments, and vice versa for other accounts. If comments and likes are treated unequally, the account that receives many comments but few likes would purportedly have a lower engagement rate.
The difficulty does not end there!
By far, the most contentious issue when it comes to determining Instagram engagement rate is whether it should be dependent on your account’s number of followers or not, as we shall discover in the upcoming sections.
How to Calculate Your Engagement Rate on Instagram?
Instead of their increased follower count, brands typically convert more leads through a wider exposure first. When people on Instagram see ads from a brand in their feed, such brand experiences heightened engagement levels. This is because well-crafted ads have the power to trigger their viewers’ curiosity, compelling them to explore more about the brand, starting first with their Instagram presence.
Prioritizing follower count over impressions gets justified thus. If you want to compare your engagement rate to your competitors, increasing follower count organically is your only choice.
The same is true when assessing a potential influencer collaborator’s engagement rate.
With that said, let us now take a deeper dive into the murky waters of mathematically calculating engagement rates on Instagram.
Note: Businesses must make their Instagram accounts Public Business Profiles, or else they’d be unable to view their impressions. You can make necessary adjustments according to your business’ offerings in Instagram’s “Edit Profile” section.
You must also ensure that you tick the box right next to the “show category on profile” option so that your business’s niche is visible to all your account visitors.
The Three Golden Formulae To Calculate Instagram Engagement
Let us now analyze the three conventional methods of calculating engagement rates on Instagram while considering the various points of conflict discussed above.
- Formula 1 [To compare different accounts on Instagram]: ((Likes + Comments) / Total Followers) x 100
- Formula 2 [To view how many people actually engaged with your post]: ((Likes + Comments) / Impressions) x 100
- Formula 3 [To get a more accurate Instagram engagement rate]: ((Likes + Comments + Saves) / Reach) x 100
Note: The multiplication of the ratios with 100 is merely to present the results as an easily digestible percentage.
As discussed before, each of these three formulae serves a purpose different from the other. There are several variations of the three, but the ones presented here broadly cover the critical factors you would want to consider while calculating your engagement levels in the first place.
Let us now get down to understanding each of these formulas in more detail.
Formula 1
[To compare different accounts on Instagram]: ((Likes + Comments) / Total Followers) x 100
Influencers and digital agencies are the ones most concerned about Instagram engagement rates.
They need to use publicly accessible data to create a standardized statistic that can be used for comparing numerous accounts. How else would they determine (quickly) how much should an account be paid for promoting their products or services?
Since literally, anybody on Instagram can check out the number of likes and comments on any account’s post, as well as the overall number of followers, it makes perfect sense to leverage all of these.
As a result, this formula of Instagram Engagement Rate is beneficial for agencies looking for the next major game-changer. It can also assist influencers in determining their engagement rate in comparison with their peers (and thus enabling them to negotiate for better pay on sponsored posts).
Formula 2
[To view how many actually engaged with your post]: ((Likes + Comments) / Impressions) x 100
This technique is significantly more accurate since it considers the absolute number of individuals who actually viewed your post instead of merely considering your total follower count (many followers most likely do not routinely engage with your posts!).
Essentially, by utilizing impressions instead of followers, you obtain a better grasp of the overall number of individuals who viewed your posts and chose to interact or not interact with them, which is mainly what an engagement rate stands for. You can check your Instagram impressions from the “Insights” tab of your business account’s dashboard, as visible in the image above.
Note: Since you alone can view your account’s impressions (and you would have to convert your personal profile to an Instagram business account to be able to do that), comparing your engagement rate with others is very difficult while using impressions.
Formula 3
[To get a more accurate Instagram rate]: ((Likes + Comments + Saves) / Reach) x 100
This is an all-encompassing formula incorporating likes, comments, AND saves. So, naturally, it will lend a more accurate representation of your account’s standing in terms of engagement.
Instagram’s ‘Reach’ metric is specific to every post you publish. Reach provides you with an exact numerical figure that indicates how many unique users saw a post. “Impressions” is a comparable Instagram stat that shows the number of times a post was viewed, regardless of whether the same person saw it several times. You can check your Instagram account’s “Reach” within the Insights section, as shown in the image below.
Since individuals are far more likely to like and comment on a post instead of saving it, this formula should yield similar results, but there’s no apparent harm in using saved posts in your calculation!
Making Use of an Instagram Engagement Rate Calculator
An Instagram Engagement Rate Calculator (or Checker) is a tool that is designed to automatically measure and evaluate your Instagram engagement rate, just as the name suggests.
After all, manually using one of the formulae above to derive results from your account’s built-in analytics can get tedious after a while.
Moreover, who’s got the time for that?
This is why we have compiled a list of top Instagram Engagement Calculators for your reference. Take a look:
- inBeat
They calculate the engagement rate of an Instagram profile by considering the average of their likes and comments over the past 12 posts. Since engagement rates fluctuate from post to post, they consider it critical to track interactions over at least 12 of them.
- Phlanx
This Instagram Engagement Calculator divides your follower count by the total number of a post’s comments and likes. Although you can do this yourself manually, the Phlanx engagement calculator automates the whole process, saving you precious time and effort! According to Phlanx official website, over 40,000 users have benefited from their free engagement calculator.
- Kicksta
This Instagram Engagement Calculator uses the formula below to calculate an account’s engagement rate:
((Like + Comments / Posts) / Total Number of Followers) / 10) * 100 = Engagement Rate
Thus, Kicksta uses a holistic formula that takes all components of engagement into consideration, including likes, comments, the total number of posts, and the overall follower count.
To be able to use an Instagram Engagement Checker properly, you would need comprehensive metrics. However, while Instagram Analytics is sufficient for personal use, it provides data for a duration so short that you can barely derive any fruitful deductions from it.
This is why you must allow us to introduce you to the SocialPilot Instagram analytics feature.
SocialPilot’s analytics feature for Instagram makes it easy for you to monitor your engagement rate for a longer duration as compared to Instagram.
Indeed, SocialPilot’s Instagram Analytic tool enables you to monitor your engagement rates for a span of a whopping 3 months (!) instead of Instagram’s maximum permissible limit of a measly 7 days.
Lending you a hawk eye’s view of your Instagram engagement rate, offering the richness of data collected within a significantly large timeframe.
That’s not all! Through SocialPilot, you can monitor multiple accounts from a single dashboard! Now, this can rightfully be called the greatest invention since sliced bread!
Gone are the days when you needed to monitor each of your Instagram accounts separately. SocialPilot is now the proven panacea for the management of multiple accounts, with its single-dashboard feature.
Conclusion
With that, we come to an end of our blog on Instagram’s engagement rate, its methods for derivation, and its calculators! Hopefully, this blog has managed to dispense some clarity on the ongoing debate about what accurately defines an Instagram engagement rate!
Your Instagram engagement rate is one of the finest metrics to check whether your platform’s content actually resonates with your audience, as reflected by their propensity to like, comment on, and save it.
Meanwhile, to witness skyrocketing Instagram engagement rates for your account, start your free trial of SocialPilot today!
