How to Check Instagram Engagement Rate & Why It Matters

Engagement rate on Instagram is one of the most important metrics for any brand or influencer maintaining an account on this social network. It is believed that the higher this indicator is, the more active and larger the audience will be and more potential customers will come. 

For an advertiser, a high engagement rate means that the influencer is reliable and an advertising campaign with them can be successful. But what exactly is ER? How to calculate it? And do you really need these calculations? Let’s find out!

What is engagement rate?

Social media engagement rate (ER) is a metric that evaluates the quality and effectiveness of publications. In this case, many parameters are taken into account at once, including:

• the number of publications per day;
• the number of users who visited the community/account during the day;
• the number of followers who can potentially see your post;
• the actual number of views of the publication;
• response of users in the form of likes, comments, and reposts.

Also, there is a measurable definition of ER. You can use an engagement rate calculator or a particular formula to calculate it – we will overview it further.

The higher the engagement rate, the better for the influencer and, therefore, for your advertising campaign. Of course, positive engagement is important. If influencers collect tons of hate in their direction, it may have a negative impact on the brands they promote. Although sometimes even a smear campaign can work well, you have to be especially careful with it. 

Why is engagement rate on Instagram so important?

The biggest mistake many business owners make starting an influencer marketing campaign is to focus only on the number of subscribers and their growth rates. This is certainly an important indicator, but far from the only one that matters.

You should not consider separately the number of subscribers, likes, and comments to posts on Instagram. Evaluate the overall engagement – this is the only way to see an objective picture. Instagram engagement rate calculators have already become popular among marketers looking for influencers for their advertising campaigns. And by working to increase its level, you additionally get several important advantages:

• growth of positions in search results within social networks;
• increasing brand awareness;
• improved performance in the so-called word-of-mouth marketing.

And most importantly, the growth of trust. Buyers choose Apple products not only because of good components and an operating system worked out to the smallest detail but also because they trust the brand.

At BuzzGuru, we know that the number of followers or likes itself is not the only indicator to take into account before launching an advertising campaign. At our analytics platform, we offer the “Channel quality” metric, which combines four components into one:

• Engagement rate, %;
• Number of likes, %;
• Number of comments, %;
• Distribution of likes.

Calculated from 1 to 100, it demonstrates the total quality of the channel and helps you to decide on possible integrations:

How can influencers increase ER on Instagram?

Imagine you need to select an influencer for an advertising campaign. You check the Instagram engagement rate and find out that this creator can’t boast high ER. Does it mean that you don’t have to start a cooperation?

Below, we’ve collected several recommendations you can give to the selected candidate. The observance of these simple rules contributes to the growth of the engagement rate.

Goals setting

Posting for the sake of posting is a road to nowhere. The first thing you and a creator should do is to clearly define your goals. Why do you start an influencer marketing campaign with this influencer and what results do you want to get from it? Options may vary:

• increasing awareness;
• communication with the target and near-target audience;
• content distribution (viral marketing, word-of-mouth);
• sales and lead generation;
• new customer acquisition, etc.

If you have not decided on the goals of the integration, then the content created by the influencer will be chaotic, poorly combined and not entirely clear to your target audience. Clearly define the goals – and the content plan will be much easier to develop.

Creating quality content

Everything is obvious here. The more quality and relevant content your influencer posts, the better. Ask a creator to answer the actual questions of the audience about the product or service you’re promoting and provide all the necessary information to make the creator show that you are the best in your business!

Audience feedback

Involving subscribers in the dialogue also helps to improve engagement rate on Instagram. Ask questions, arrange voting, hold contests, etc. This is important both for Instagram algorithms and for increasing your brand awareness.

Publish stories and live broadcasts

Notifications about live broadcasts come instantly to the influencer’s audience. And even if subscribers do not watch them here and now, this serves as a good reminder of the creator. Also a plus!

Many marketers have long ago called Stories more important materials than posts in the feed. They engage more audiences and hold their attention better. The links included in them are also very convenient. 

How to calculate the ER and what is an Instagram engagement calculator?

There are two simple formulas you can use. Thus, if you need to calculate the ER of the entire creator’s profile on Instagram, for example, do the following:

The second formula measures the engagement of subscribers in a particular post. It's similar to the formula above, just instead of the overall number of interactions, you need to use the number of interactions for a particular post.

It is worth considering that these formulas do not give a 100% objective assessment, because they do not take into account users who interact with publications without being page subscribers. And their share in the total mass is sometimes very significant.

If you're tired of manually calculating engagement rates, you might want to use an engagement rate calculator. This type of software is now actively produced by various companies to help marketers in their influencer marketing campaigns. Using a typical engagement Instagram calculator, you only need to fill in the fields with the data and you’ll receive the ER percentage value for a particular Instagram account or post. 

Such calculators can be very helpful, but BuzzGuru provides a much better solution. Our analytics and discovery platform does not make you apply any effort to get the ER calculated. To get the engagement rate of a particular influencer, you only need to follow 3 steps:

You will immediately observe the ER values for every creator on the list. You can modify the list selecting to show the creators with the increasing or decreasing ER. Moreover, you can filter the influencers by ER. For that, just specify the desirable ER value in the filter:

With our platform, there is no need to use an engagement calculator for Instagram every time you wish to check an influencer. You will get all the necessary statistics at once – comparing creators has never been easier! 

What ER on Instagram is considered good?

The optimal engagement rate is a very vague concept. Much depends on the specifics of the business you would like to promote and therefore the Instagram creators that can help you with integrations, the target audience, the Instagram algorithms, and so on. 

However, when you are selecting a creator for an advertising campaign or if you have already used any engagement rate calculator for Instagram and got the values, you may wonder what rate can be considered a “good” one. Below, we provide a rough estimate of what it should be for 30 calendar days:

• Less than 1% – a very low rate, hardly the ad campaign with such a creator will bring good results;
• 1–3.5% – average ER;
• 3.5-6% – high rate, good result;
• from 6% and above – excellent, the influencer is doing everything right and you can expect great results from this collaboration.

Naturally, engagement rates can change from month to month for objective reasons. For example, if you need a creator to promote a seasonal product on Instagram, the decline in subscriber interest is quite logical. In such cases, it is absolutely not worth panicking if the ER will be around 1-2% or even lower. This is fine!

Another point to keep in mind is the number of followers. Usually, the more subscribers an influencer has, the lower the ER threshold is. It happens because the number of comments and reach are different indicators and do not depend on the impressions of the publication. For example, if there were 10,000 impressions, then the normal number of comments is 50-100. The opposite situations are also possible when the post was interesting or presented in an original format.

Conclusion

Engagement rate is one of the key parameters to take into account when starting an influencer marketing campaign. Influencers constantly monitor the analytics, discover which publications involve the most audience, what time of day and days of the week the subscribers are the most active, and how they react to the posts in general because they know it will bring more successful integrations.

To find Instagram influencer for your advertising campaign and to get unlimited access to Instagram creators’ analytics, give an eye to the BuzzGuru platform – here, you will find not only the ER values, but much more useful information to get prepared for future integrations.