After a frantic hunt for followers, the trend on Instagram in recent years has been to know how to capture and retain an audience through engaging content. Engaging content is content that makes people react. The problem is that the larger the community, the more difficult it is to maintain a good engagement rate. However, it is this same rate of engagement that is taken into account in the Instagram algorithm and allows you to gain visibility.
Before going into the details of the calculations, it is important to remember the concept of engagement. On Instagram, it can be likes, comments, shares or even registrations generated under a publication. It is ultimately all the interactions made on a content, whether it is a photo or a video. The engagement rate is the ultimate quality indicator; it allows you to judge the relevance of the content shared with your community.
To calculate the Instagram engagement rate, we will mainly take into account likes and comments.
There are several methods for calculating the engagement rate. The important thing is to make sure you keep the same calculation method over time in order to homogenise your analyses.
his is the percentage of people who interact with an Instagram account or an Instagram publication on a daily basis after having come into contact with it. It can be calculated with this formula: sum of interactions divided by the number of followers. This option is interesting because it allows you to compare yourself with your competitors; the number of followers and the number of likes are data available to everyone. It is also an opportunity to determine to what extent an Instagrammer is an influencer or not.
To summarise: (Likes + Comments) / Followers x 100 = Engagement rate per follower.
This second method of calculation is only possible for professional Instagram accounts because they have access to reach. This calculation takes into account the people who have actually seen your post and therefore brings more precision to your engagement rate. Don’t forget that a good part of your followers will never see your Instagram posts…
To summarize: (Likes + Comments) / Reach x 100 = Engagement rate per person reached.
To go further, it can also be interesting to calculate your positive engagement rate, i.e. to be able to exclude all positive reactions to your brand. The engagement rate does not take into account the tone of the interactions, which can be positive or negative (during a bad buzz for example).
Instagram is the preferred social network for influencers, as it is the platform that generates the most engagement. An Instagram post would generate 23%(1) more engagement than if it had been published on Facebook (which has many more monthly active users). Instagram is therefore also becoming the preferred social network for brands when it comes to engagement when they want to interact with their audience.
The average engagement rate on Instagram is 2.84%(2) but be aware that this rate is strongly correlated to the number of followers. The larger the community, the lower the average engagement rate. There is no single “good” engagement rate.
If you want to collaborate with an Instagrammer for your next influencer marketing campaign, you should therefore first take into account the size of their community before judging whether their engagement rate is good or not.
The graph below speaks for itself: the average engagement for a nano-influencer is 5.6% while that of a mega-influencer varies from 2.05% to 1.97%:
Nano and micro-influencers have a small community, but are becoming increasingly interesting for brands wishing to launch an Influence Marketing campaign. Their engagement rate is on average much better than that of a macro-influencer. It is, in fact, easier to interact with a small audience. As a brand, you will indirectly benefit from an engaged audience, ready to like and re-share content.
Another important point in defining one’s influence strategy is that the formats offered by Instagram generate higher or lower engagement rates.
The first observation: posts with an image get 27% more engagement than a post with a video and 13% more likes than a photo carousel(3).
Videos now have their place on other formats – Instagram stories or Instagram Reels. Both of these formats generate engagement primarily because they allow for spontaneous and more authentic content than a photo. Instagram also offers a wide range of interactive buttons for its stories: poll, slider, question…
Good news, some Instagram practices can boost your engagement rate, and this without necessarily incurring advertising costs.
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, offering a data-driven solution that empowers brands to scale their KOL (Key Opinion Leader) marketing strategies through authentic partnerships with top creators.
Kolsquare’s advanced technology helps marketing professionals seamlessly identify the best content creators by filtering their content and audience, while also enabling them to build, manage, and optimize campaigns from start to finish. This includes measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors.
With a thriving global community of influencer marketing experts, Kolsquare serves hundreds of customers—including Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, Lush, and Hermès—by leveraging the latest Big Data, AI, and Machine Learning technologies. Our platform taps into an extensive network of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers across 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat.
As a Certified B Corporation, Kolsquare leads the way in promoting Responsible Influence, championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations that inspire positive change.
Since October 2024, Kolsquare has become part of the Team.Blue group, one of the largest private tech companies in Europe, and a leading digital enabler for businesses and entrepreneurs across Europe. Team.Blue brings together over 60 successful brands in web hosting, domains, e-commerce, online compliance, lead generation, application solutions, and social media.
