How to calculate your Instagram engagement rate
Strangely, calculating your Instagram engagement rate is not a simple process. To help you understand the complicated concepts of Instagram engagement rate that might confuse an Instagram debutant, we’ve prepared some useful tips. Read on to know more!
How is Instagram engagement rate calculated?
Divide your engagement by either your followers or impressions to arrive at your Instagram Engagement Rate.
Hey, if it’s really that simple, why make it sound so complicated in the beginning?
Hang on, there is a problem here. The thing is that there are many ways of calculating the Instagram engagement rate. That’s what makes things complicated.
How do you calculate engagement?
The maximum of users calculate engagement by adding likes and comments. Some are of the view that engagement should also comprise the number of times a post was saved.
There is debate on whether comments and likes should be treated as equals in terms of gauging engagement. But can ‘one comment’ equal ‘one like’ as far as engagement is concerned? It may be that one particular account gets thousands of likes but only hundreds of comments and vice versa. Hence, if comments and likes are considered to be on an equal footing, then the account that will get fewer likes but many comments would be at disadvantage in terms of engagement rate.
If that sounds confusing, it keeps getting more complicated.
Instagrammers are also divided on another front that seems to be the biggest bone of contention. When the Instagram engagement rate is being calculated, should it consider your total number of followers or total impressions? Which one should be stressed upon?
Well, human beings will never completely agree with each other over everything, will they?
Let’s just bury the differences and take a look at the 3 most preferred methods of calculating the Instagram engagement rate. Let us also analyse the strengths and disadvantages of each method to conclude why some work better in certain situations.
Option 1 - Engagement/Followers
This is the first option where your total number of likes and comments are divided by your follower count. This is then multiplied by 100 to arrive at a percentage.
This is a cool method as the data that is used to make the calculation is available for everyone to see and hence works to benchmark against other accounts.
Advocates of this option prefer to use Followers over Impressions, concluding that doing the same is the logical and best option when you are comparing your Instagram engagement rate with that of your rivals. Note that this method also holds good if you want to evaluate the engagement rate of a potential influencer partner that you want to tie up with to promote your product/brand/services.
Option 2 - Engagement/Impressions
The second option divides the total likes and comments by the impressions. This is then multiplied by 100 to arrive at a percentage. This second method is a bit more accurate than the first. That’s because it considers the total number of people that actually saw your posts rather than the total number of followers. It is likely that many of your followers missed some of your posts after all. So, by using impressions we use data rather than the followers you have to gain an insight about the number of people who saw your posts but chose to either engage or not engage with them. That is what engagement rate basically is.
However, only you can see the impressions of your account, and you have to use your Instagram business profile to check out the same. Hence, it is not feasible to compare your engagement rate to others with this method as you do not have access to the impressions of other accounts.
Option 3 - True Engagement/Impressions
The third and last method is that of ‘true engagement’ to calculate your engagement rate. This method takes into account not just the likes and comments but also how many times your posts were actually saved. This data is accessible in the Content Insights of your Instagram business account. However, Instagram adds saved posts to their engagement metric as well. So, all that needs to be done is divide engagement by impressions and multiply by 100.
Which is the best of the 3 methods?
All 3 methods are used to calculate the engagement rate. This is because your goals can be subjective, i.e. differing from person to person. Also, it depends on situations like if it’s your own account or that of someone else.
If you are calculating your own Instagram engagement rate, using Impressions makes more sense as it gives you the correct analysis as to how your content was received by users. But, if your goal is to compare your engagement with your rivals or if you want to check out the engagement of an influencer you are planning to rope in as a partner, using Followers is a better idea. That’s only because the data is readily available to one and all.
FAQs
- How do you calculate engagement rate on Instagram 2021?
Divide the number of likes and comments by your total number of followers and then multiply by 100.
Engagement = (Likes + Comments) / Followers x 100.
Engagement = (Likes + Comments + Saves) / Impressions x 100. - What is a good engagement rate for Instagram?
If it’s less than 1% it’s a low engagement rate. If it’s between 1% and 3.5% it’s an average/good engagement rate. If the engagement rate is between 3.5% and 6%, it’s considered as a high engagement rate. - How does Instagram calculate total engagement?
Instagram adds the number of comments and likes on a post, and then dividing by the number of followers. Then, it multiplies by 100 to arrive at the percentage. - How do you calculate engagement rate per post?
See the total number of engagements on a post and the reach per post. Then, divide the total number of engagements on a post according to the reach per post. Multiply the result by 100. - How is reach calculated?
To calculate reach, divide impressions by frequency (reach = impressions/frequency).
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