Have you ever calculated your Instagram engagement rate? It is a very important number that shows you how active your audience is! The easiest form of engagement is a like, followed by a comment.
Engagement rates
Engagement varies as your account grows, but generally you can say that anything between 2-4% is acceptable engagement. Anything above 5% is excellent. I noticed that accounts under 10k usually have a much higher engagement somewhere around 8%. I also know many micro-influencers who have less than 10k but 10-20% engagement and are often getting more likes than accounts with 50k! 
This is a weird phenomenon I still haven’t quite figured out yet. It seems like the more follower you have the less engagement you get. Some accounts with millions of followers only get 1-2% engagement.
Crazy right?!
I did some research and found some interesting insights from the influencer marketing platform Markerly who reported that accounts with less than one thousand followers have a like rate of about 8 percent.
This drops increasingly as influencers become more popular. Between 1.000 and 10.000 followers the influencer can record a like rate of about 4%. The like rate keeps decreasing within the range of 10.000 to 100.000 followers to only 2,4%. Once reaching the 1 million followers mark the rate drops to 1.7%. According to Markerly the rates for comments follow a similar pattern.
I wanted to show you the graphic here where you can see the decrease of likes and comments compared to increasing followers.
I also found a super interesting fact in a book called „influencer marketing“ where the authors established a 90-9-1 rule regarding user engagement. They looked at social communities and found out that 90% of all followers are people who view information but never or rarely take part in the conversation. The next 9% of followers contribute a little and the final 1% are those that create almost all the engagement and conversations.
I have to say this something I totally notice on my own account as well. I always have those couple super engaged followers who comment and like every single one of my posts, then I have a couple who occasionally will write a comment and then a big amount of people who just look at the content, but won’t take any action.
So now finally how do you actually calculate Instagram engagement rate?
You can calculate your engagement rate by dividing the number of likes you get by the number of followers times 100. (E.g.: 1.500likes : 34.000followers x 100 = 4.4%)
Make it your little assignment today to calculate that number, it is a very interesting info into your accounts health 🙂
If you don’t want to calculate the engagement rate yourself I have a great tip for you. There is a free tool called Kicksta that will calculate the engagement rate for you.
I hope this article was helpful and I simply wanted to show you that you don’t have to start getting worried if you notice a decrease in engagement once your account starts growing. Even the statistics show that it is a normal thing that happens. Check out my other Instagram growth blog post for more info:
Sources: (Brown/Fiorella (2013), p. 7.) & (https://digiday.com/marketing/micro-influencers/)
Lots of love,
3 Kommentare
„You can calculate your engagement rate by dividing the number of likes you get by the number of followers times 100.“
But the numbers of likes of the last post, of a random post, the sum of all of posts… or which number of likes exactly?
Good point Daniel. So if you want your average engagement rate you need to take the average number of likes you get on a post. if you want to know the engagement rate for a specific post, then take the number of likes for that post 🙂