What is a Good Instagram Engagement Rate?

Instagram is a very effective platform for marketing as well as for personal use. Every brand who wants to be successful has to have a presence there. Whether you’re promoting yourself or a company, turning up isn’t enough. You have to engage to become an influencer. So what is a good engagement rate on Instagram and how can you increase yours?

Engagement on Instagram is regarded as a like, comment, reaction or share of an Instagram post or Story. It measures the percentage of your audience that actively responds to your content. As an influencer, this will show you what types of content work best and what types don’t. You can then refine, improve or diversify your Instagram posting to match your goals.

If you’re looking to engage a social media marketer, or become one, engagement rates will be used as a metric to assess fit. If you have the right levels of engagement in particular content types that match a client, you stand a higher chance of getting the job. If you don’t, you won’t.

What is a good engagement rate on Instagram?

Social media marketing is all about the numbers. Delivering content to your platform is the easy part. Analyzing, refining and adapting are the hard bit. So what is regarded as a good engagement rate?

• An engagement rate of 5% and above is regarded as very good.
• An engagement rate of 3-5% is regarded as good.
• An engagement rate of 1-3% is regarded as average.
• An engagement rate of less than 1.5% is regarded as poor.

These percentages change and some marketers use 6% engagement as the market for very good but I think 5% is more achievable and more realistic now audiences are becoming more particular about the content they interact with.

If you’re marketing on Instagram or working to become an influencer, anything between 1 and 3% is good. You will want to increase this as you get better at producing content and delivering what your audience is looking for but that’s a good place to begin.

If you compare that to an average engagement rate of up to 1% for Twitter and Facebook, you can see that Instagram users seem much more willing to actively engage. This is why so many brands want a presence on the social network.

Calculating Instagram engagement rates

Now you know what a good engagement rate looks like on Instagram, how do you figure out yours? There is some math involved but it is actually quite straightforward. Everyone uses the same calculation so the results should be universal.

1. Count the number of comments, likes and shares for a post.
2. Divide that number by the number of followers you have.
3. Multiply that number by 100 to get the percentage.

For example, you have 25,000 followers received 350 comments or likes. The math would be 350 / 25,000 x 100 = 1.4%. This is a relatively low engagement rate in the grand scheme of things but demonstrates the math involved in calculating it.

You would need to do this per post or you can use math to calculate monthly engagement instead of per post. All you do is calculate the number of posts per month, add all of the engagements from across all posts, divide that number of engagements by the number of posts and continue the calculation above.

For example, 30 posts a month with a total of 10,050 comments spread across 25,000 followers. 10,050/30/25,000 x 100 = 1.4%. Again, a low score but demonstrates the calculation.

Engagement versus reach

In social media marketing, engagement is much more important than reach. That means the engagement rate is way more important than the number of followers an Instagram account has. After all, there’s no point having 200,000 followers if you engage at less than 1%.

You would be much better off pruning that number and tuning your content to better engage 2,000 followers at 5% and build from there. Not only does this give you much more bang for your buck, anyone looking to hire you to perform social media marketing on their behalf will look at engagement and not followers.

Ideally you will want both if you are to become an influencer. However, you would be much better off starting small with high engagement than high with low engagement. If it comes down to it, you’re better off interacting a lot with a few friends than hardly at all with lots of friends. Not only does it make you a better marketer but it also makes doing the actual job much more satisfying!