If you want to see how well your content is performing, Engagement Rate is the social media marketing world's gold standard.
The method of calculating your Instagram engagement rate depends on whether you’re doing it for your own account, or someone else’s.
For your own accounts
For an account you own or have access to (e.g. a client’s), you’ll be able to see all the post metrics, including likes, comments, shares, clicks, profile visits and more.
Engagements include:
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares to Story
- Saves/Bookmarks
(You can also include Profile Visits and Follows as well, but that’s up to you.)
You therefore combine all of the engagement metrics and use Reach to calculate your Instagram engagement rate:
Engagements divided by Reach, multiplied by 100 = Engagement Rate %
Here’s a calculation for a typical Instagram post.
| Engagements | Reach | Engagement Rate |
| Likes: 35 Comments: 13 Shares: 0 Saves: 6 |
204 | 26.47% |
Should you use Reach or Impressions to calculate Instagram engagement rate?
I get this question a lot!
Reach is the number of individual people who saw your post, whereas Impressions are the number of times your post was viewed.
So if 10 people saw your post, that would be a Reach of 10.
But if one of those people saw the post 3 times, you would have 12 Impressions.
It’s completely up to you which metric you use to calculate your Instagram engagement rate.
When I perform social media audits for clients and monitor my own content’s performance, I prefer to use Reach because it gives me a better idea of how far the content has gone, and tells me whether we used the right combination of hashtags.
For competitors and influencers
If you want to benchmark yourself against a competitor or see how much authority an influencer has beyond their follower count, your access to metrics is somewhat limited.
The only relevant metrics you can see are:
- Likes
- Comments
- Followers
So when calculating the Instagram engagement rate for a competitor or influencer, you’re actually calculating the engagement rate from their followers, rather than from their audience like you would for your own account:
Engagements divided by Followers, multiplied by 100 = Engagement Rate %
Here’s how you would calculate the follower engagement rate for a selection of typical Instagram posts.
| Post Engagements | Followers | Engagement Rate | Average |
|---|---|---|---|
| Likes: 51 Comments: 4 |
945 | 5.82% | 5.37% |
| Likes: 35 Comments: 13 |
5.07% | ||
| Likes: 37 Comments: 13 |
5.24% |
Note that the account's followers may go up between the first and last post. In these cases, I always use the Follower count at the time of the middle post, creating a sort of 'average'.
However this isn’t always possible when analysing other people’s accounts, so you’ll probably have to use the current follower count to calculate Instagram engagement rates!
What’s a good engagement rate?
As of December 2019, the average Instagram engagement rate is 3%.
That’s for all types of accounts across the Instagram network, so if you want to see the benchmark for your industry/niche, you’ll need to get a spreadsheet open and start finding relevant accounts!
Conclusion
So there you have it! You now know how to calculate Instagram engagement rates for yourself, your clients, competitors, and influencers.
What will you do with your new-found power?
