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There’s more to life than likes. For example, there’s engagement rate.
Knowing your Instagram engagement rate—and developing a social media strategy to maintain or improve your engagement rate—is an essential part of finding success on the platform.
Especially if you’re using Instagram for business: engaged followers are much more likely to become customers than followers who simply scroll by your content. Getting that like, comment or share gets you one step closer to a sale.
Having good engagement also means that your content will be favored by Instagram’s algorithm. So IG will show your posts to more people more often—and that’s always a win.
Here’s how to check your engagement rate on Instagram for free.
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Try Hootsuite’s free interactive engagement calculator for Instagram now:
How to use the Instagram engagement rate calculator
To use Hootsuite’s engagement rate calculator for Instagram, just type in each value requested.
If you’re calculating your total engagement rate, use your account’s total number of posts, likes, comments, etc.
If you’re just calculating your engagement rate for a specific marketing campaign, use only the information from the posts that are included in that campaign.
And if you’re calculating your engagement rate for a single post, use only the details of that one post.
The Instagram engagement calculator above is simple, so it’s an easy method to get a quick-and-dirty snapshot of your Instagram success. But Hootsuite has more complex calculators incorporated right into the social media management dashboard — it’s a more robust tool for getting a more thorough look at your engagement (and not just on Instagram).
For a taste of more advanced calculators, check out our free spreadsheet calculator that can determine engagement rate by reach, impressions, and more.
What is an Instagram engagement rate calculator?
An Instagram engagement rate calculator calculates your Instagram engagement rate (duh) by using metrics like follower count, likes and comments.
Your engagement rate is different from simple stats (for example, how many likes a post got) because it also takes into account how many followers you have.
The Hootsuite Instagram engagement rate calculator included in this article determines post engagement rate, meaning that it’s best used for specific IG posts (as opposed to your account’s total engagement rate).
The engagement rate formula used here is:
Total engagements on a specific post / Total followers *100
Why does Instagram engagement matter?
Here’s a hypothetical: if Instagram account A has 5 likes on a post and Instagram account B has 1000 likes on a post, you’d probably assume that account B is outperforming account A.
But say Instagram account A has 100 followers and Instagram account B has 100,000 followers. That means that 5% of account A’s followers liked their post—that’s an excellent engagement rate. Only 0.1% of account B’s followers liked their post, which means much lower engagement.
What’s a good Instagram engagement rate?
The more followers that you have on Instagram, the more difficult it is to have a high engagement rate. Social media experts agree that a good engagement rate is between 1% and 5%. That might not sound like much, but it is!
Here are the global average engagement rates for different types of posts on Instagram business accounts:
- All Instagram post types: 0.54%
- Instagram photo posts: 0.46%
- Video posts: 0.61%
- Carousel posts: 0.62%
And here are the global average engagement rates per number of followers for business accounts:
- Fewer than 10,000 followers: 0.76%
- 10,000 – 100,000 followers: 0.63%
- More than 100,000%: 0.49%
So engagement rate typically goes down as follower count goes up. That’s why Instagram influencers with high engagement are better for influencer marketing partnerships than influencers with more followers but lower engagement.
Top 3 ways to improve your Instagram engagement
If your Instagram engagement rate is below 1% (or if you’re just an overachiever), here are the best ways to improve.
Post interactive content
People who view your posts will be more likely to engage with your content if you prompt them. In other words: if you want engagement, just ask! You can do this in your posts, Reels and Stories.
This Instagram post from Rupaul’s Drag Race encourages fans to post about who they think should win the competition. The post itself has a high number of likes and comments, and combined, the branded hashtags have been used millions of times.
Source: Instagram
Instagram stories have lots of opportunities for engagement, too—interactive stickers like the poll, quiz, question and link options all prompt viewers to engage. This sticker from People magazine’s story goes right to a link to Met Gala information, providing easy access to timely info.
Source: Instagram
And this story from Joanna Gaines asks a question: her followers are encouraged to answer it, which increases her engagement.
A contest is another great form of interactive content. Host a contest or giveaway (like this one from KitchenAid) to give your follower, like and comment count an instant boost.
Answer comments and DMs
Engagement is a two-way street: make sure that you’re interacting with your followers and building meaningful relationships, because that will make them more likely to interact with you.
Being a dependable source of information about your brand is key, but you can also just reply to DMs and comments to show your followers that you’re listening.
Source: Instagram
For example, look at this string of comments from clothing company Plenty: the brand replies to comments that ask for details about a warehouse sale (relaying info about sale hours) but also just generally replies to comments from followers who are excited about the sale.
Post consistently (and at strategic times)
Because there’s such a large volume of Instagram content (IG has over 2 billion active users every month), you want to make sure that your followers are actually seeing your posts, stories and reels. One strategy to ensure that your content is being seen is to post at the times that your audience is online.
How do you know when your audience will be online? Ask Hootsuite.
Hootsuite’s Best Time to Publish feature tells you when to post for maximum engagement (and that’s not just for Instagram—use this for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok, too).
Psst—looking for more ideas? Here’s 15 ways to boost your Instagram engagement, with examples.
Instagram engagement rate FAQs
How do I check my engagement rate on Instagram?
Use Hootsuite’s free engagement rate calculator to find your Instagram engagement rate.
Is a 5% engagement rate on Instagram good?
An engagement rate from 1% to 5% is good, according to social media experts—anything below that is less than good, and anything above that is stellar.
What is a good engagement rate for Instagram?
A good Instagram engagement rate is between 1% and 5%. Here’s 15 ways to increase your engagement on Instagram.
Increase your Instagram engagement rate using Hootsuite. Schedule and publish posts and Stories, respond to comments, measure your performance over time, and run all your other social media profiles — all from one simple dashboard. Try it free today.
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