The use of statistics is necessary to learn whether your Instagram marketing strategy is successful or not. However, it seems that some social networks are unwilling and avoid using them. To be more specific, Instagram lacks its own designed engagement metrics, unlike Twitter or Facebook.
What is Instagram Engagement?
By Instagram engagement rate, we mean your follower’s loyalty level within this platform. It’s not about the number of followers you have but about the level of interaction, interest, and involvement that your audience shows towards your pictures, videos, Instagram stories or any other content.
If you are a social media manager, you might be familiar with this situation:
“You are at work, beginning your day programming on Instagram, answering direct messages or creating ads to gain better visibility for your brand.Suddenly, your boss asks you for «a complete report revealing the Instagram evolution in the last three months» Of course, you panic, what should you cover in the report? Stay calm; you are not alone”.
Many platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, offer some analysis tools to measure the success of a specific campaign. However, measuring Instagram Engagement Rate is not that simple. Even though Instagram rolled out some features to make it more marketing-friendly,the truth is, the process hardly started. That’s why Instagooo wants to explain to you some basic information that will help you analyze your progress.
How to Calculate Instagram Engagement Rate?
- Followers
It might seem obvious, but analyzing the exponential growth of your followers in any social network, and also analyzing how frequently you gain new fans, is crucial. Many social network platforms and online marketing specialists think that if these numbers don’t improve overtime, your presence on Instagram is pointless. So, always keep this factor inmind.
- Likes

Another main factor that it’s some thing ignored. It’s critical to observe how many likes a content receives, and then compare this result with your other posts and also with the number of your Instagram followers. This straightforward equation is a great symbol of the popularity of your account.
- Comments

Once you have gone through the necessary steps, let’s review something a bit more complicated. An analysis of the comments received by each content will help you monitor the level of yourfollower’s engagement. Even though analyzing like rates might give you an idea about how successful a post is,comments will show up with better certainty, the level of engagement. Liking an Instagram post takes only one second but spending some time on crafting a comment will be a better sign of users’ engagement.
At a more practical level, you should know auser will take the time to leave a comment only if he feels empathy or any sort of emotion towards a brand. If the numberof comments starts rising, it means that your brand is developing a loyal audience.
What affects the engagement on Instagram?
#Hashtags
Using popular hashtags under your posts can increase Instagram engagement, and youcan probably reach more followers. Posts followed by hashtags will get better engagement and also will be more accessible to general public. Analyzing which hashtags are more trendy and listing them onyour clipboard will help you find out which one is more useful for your posts.In this platform, hashtags works as key words to improve searching.
In summary, Instagram is a platform that promotes the combined use of hashtags so that users will be able to create alist with the popular ones. Also, it will be a small thing to do considering all this received info when you are uploading a new post. The popularity of a specific hashtag will also show what kindof content your followers are interested in.
Timing
A common issue between users is not paying enough attention to the times when they publish their content. Why should you work hard to get quality content for followers when you end up publishing them at times that will be probably invisible to your followers? It makes no sense. Then, how can you find out which times are best to post onInstagram?
Picture sizes
the picture sizes on your posts also indirectly affect the engagement rate. Posting a low-quality photo or stock picture is worse than using your own picture with the right banding and dimensions.
Engagement rate formula on Instagram

With the information collected from engagement, you can begin using the Instagram engagement formula. Before we go through this, we should remind you that you can apply many different equations, but whatever you choose to use, don’t change it so that you can keep the consistency in your analysis. This is the most common formula employed by social media managers and the one we use in Instago:
That’s it.
Engagements are critical on Instagram, especially with the new algorithm coming up. That’s why you should focus on creating more interacting content such as stories with polls, contests, and Insta-challenges to collect more engagement foryour Instagram account.
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