In 2022 businesses must have a social media presence. That said, simply being present on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok or Instagram isn’t enough. You need people who are willing to reach out and engage with your posts and your account. Measuring Instagram engagement can help you understand where you are now and how your account needs to grow and change to truly be successful on the app.
What’s Instagram Engagement?
Instagram engagement is how much your followers or others on the app who don’t follow you are engaging with your posts. This includes likes, comments, shares and saves on your feed posts and other engagement options like participating in a poll or asking questions on your Instagram Stories. Your engagement is crucial for many reasons, but we’ll get to those in a moment.
In the meantime, it’s important to know that engagement is one of the biggest reasons real instagram followers are so important as opposed to bots. If you have a large following of bots or fake accounts, they aren’t going to want to or be able to engage with your content. Because of this, your engagement rate will plummet and it can cause a variety of problems for your account and your business. Now, let’s talk about why Instagram engagement is important.
Why Instagram Engagement Is So Important For Your Growth Strategy
There are four major reasons Instagram engagement is something crucial you should be working to monitor and optimize. The biggest point to remember is that you need good engagement in order to consistently grow your following on Instagram. Follower count is important for a variety of reasons, but your engagement should go hand-in-hand with it to be successful.
The Instagram Algorithm
The first reason we’ll talk about is one of the most obvious: the Instagram algorithm. If Instagram sees that your followers are liking, sharing and commenting on your content, they’ll be more likely to show your content to non-followers as well. High engagement will also encourage the algorithm to put it higher on your followers’ timelines.
The algorithm is critical for growth on Instagram. There are plenty of ways to grow your following, like having the right hashtag strategy or using engagement marketing, but the algorithm can help you grow more quickly because it puts your posts in front of people that the app thinks will want to engage with your content. It knows what types of content a user has engaged with in the past, and it uses that data to promote your posts to those who would be more likely to engage with it. The algorithm’s goal is to keep people on Instagram because that leads to more ad revenue for the platform. The best way to do that is by showing them quality posts so they’ll want to stay and scroll for longer.
The best way for the algorithm to decide whether or not something is quality is by seeing how many people engage with it. If you have 2,000 followers but only 10 of them regularly engage with your posts, Instagram will assume that your content isn’t very good quality. They’ll decide not to show it to new people because they probably won’t enjoy seeing it. The higher your engagement on a particular post, the more likely the algorithm is to promote it.
Shows Interest In Your Content
While the algorithm might show your content to new people, it isn’t going to automatically make new people like your page. They have to make that decision on their own. When potential followers are scouting your page, it looks good to show them that your followers are enjoying your content. This means they’ll likely enjoy your content, too! If someone is considering following your page and they see that you have thousands of followers but only a few likes and comments on each post, they’re going to think that your content isn’t valuable or entertaining, and they’ll likely click away.
Instead, when your posts are popular and generating high engagement, your potential followers will want to hit that follow button so they don’t miss a moment. They’ll want to see everything you create since your existing followers enjoy it and engage with it so much. This is important no matter what your Instagram growth strategy is. Any good-quality strategy will work to drive potential followers to your page. From there, your content needs to show them why they should follow. Your posts themselves are important, but so is the engagement they get. After all, social proof is important to people because it makes them feel like they’re making a good decision.
Finding Partnerships
There are many benefits of being on social media and influencer and brand partnerships is one of them. When you are finding brands or influencers to partner with, they are going to consider your Instagram engagement rate when deciding to work with you. This number shows them that your followers are active and will interact with any contest or giveaway you create together. A brand or influencer wants to work with a company whose followers are engaged, otherwise they’ll feel like they’re wasting their time and money.
To determine your instagram engagement rate, use an Instagram engagement rate calculator. This will give you a good idea of where you stand currently. If your engagement rate is low, consider working to improve it before you approach anyone on Instagram to suggest a partnership. This will be helpful in a couple of ways. First of all, it will make potential partners more likely to agree to work with you, which is step one. However, it will also give you more data to share about what posts resonate well with your audience. When you have good engagement, you can more accurately see which kinds of posts perform better than others and what your audience enjoys seeing.
4. Creates Brand Credibility
Finally, if you’re a brand on Instagram, having followers who interact and engage with your content will help give the credibility needed to drive traffic and conversions to your website. Whereas if they see you have no engagement, they may worry you aren’t a real service or have a bad product. Let’s face it, Instagram marketing is a tool you can use to increase your sales. At the end of the day, your follower count, engagement rate, and any other Instagram metric don’t really matter (unless you’re an influencer). Likes don’t pay the bills. Now, if you’re using social media simply as a way to generate customer or client feedback, that’s a different story, but it’s likely not a good strategy.
When you’re using Instagram as a marketing tool, you want to eventually drive people off of Instagram and onto your website so they can make a purchase. That’s where your business will actually grow. If someone comes across your account on Instagram and is interested in what you’re selling, they’ll likely take a look at some of your posts. If you have low Instagram engagement, they might be turned off and decide to find one of your competitors. They might see that people don’t want to engage with your content, and wonder if they’re actually buying your product or service.
Instagram Engagement: Frequently Asked Questions
While this overview is hopefully helpful in improving your knowledge around Instagram engagement, there are a couple of questions you might still have.
- What’s A Good Engagement Rate On Instagram?
A good Instagram engagement rate is anywhere between one and five percent. If you’re just getting started and your follower count is really small, it can be easy to go over that five-percent mark. After all, if you have 200 followers and you get more than 10 likes, comments, or shares on your posts, on average, you’re going to be above that five percent. As your following grows, that number will likely go down some. That’s okay. Try to keep it as close to five percent as you can and you’ll be doing just fine.
- How Does Instagram Determine Engagement?
Instagram calculates engagement by adding together your likes, comments, shares and saves, and divides that by the number of impressions you get. Many engagement rate calculators will divide your engagement by the number of followers and then the number of posts they gathered data from to get an average engagement rate.
Putting It Into Action
By now you understand how important your engagement rate is to your success on Instagram and you know why it’s so critical. But what do you do if your Instagram engagement is low? Well, begin with your analytics and see what posts are generating the most engagement. Then, start posting more of that content. It might be infographics, customer testimonials, posts that include your puppy, or any number of things. Let the data drive your decisions so you know that you’re giving your audience what they want to see. As always, monitor the analytics and see how your new posts are performing. You can always make additional changes if necessary.
Your Instagram engagement is important to ensure that you’re not wasting your time and energy on the platform. By optimizing your engagement you can reach new people, grow your following, convert followers into customers, and form strong partnerships with brands and influencers. So, are you ready to begin optimizing your Instagram engagement today?