How To Measure Instagram Engagement
Engagement seems to be the Instagram buzzword of the year…
But what does it mean, why is it important, and how can we MEASURE it to understand our account performance better?
In this blog post I want to show you where you can find this vital information on your account, because Instagram has mixed things up a bit lately in terms of how their ‘Insights’ section looks.
Prefer to watch? Check this out on YouTube:
What classes as ‘engagement’ on Instagram?
When people talk about engagement they usually mean some way in which your followers interact with your content, rather than just scrolling past or passively viewing what you have on your account.
Engagement used to be largely thought of as just your ‘Like to Follower ratio’ (ie. how many Likes you got on average on your posts as a percentage of how many Followers you have).
For example if you had 1000 followers, and you had on average 20 Likes on your photos, your engagement rate would have been 2%.
Nowadays you might now see people and Instagram management platforms describing engagement as your average Likes + Comments as a percentage of your following.
So for example if you had 1000 followers and on average have 20 Likes on your photos, but also get on average 10 comments on your photos, your engagement rate would be 3%.
However there are two issues with this calculation:
It misses out a few other forms of interactions too; such as Saves (where someone saves your post to a private archive of their for future reference) and Shares (where someone shares your post to their Stories or to a friend).
It doesn’t take into account the fact that different interactions have different values.
What I mean by that is that Liking a photo as a form of engagement is worth less and means less than someone taking the time to comment on a photo. Commenting (especially if it’s more than a few words and actually meaningful) takes a lot more time and effort than a Like which only requires someone to double tap and then keep scrolling.
Generally speaking, a ‘Like’ is the least valuable form of interaction as it can be very passive, whereas a comment shows that the person has really taken an interest in your content and is more likely to remember your account.
And so when I talk about engagement, I encourage you to think beyond Likes and look more at:
Comments
Saves
Shares
Why is Engagement important?
These are the types of interactions that indicate someone has made a real connection with your content and your brand. They are more likely to remember your account and your business name, and maybe even hop over to your profile or click through to your website.
Having good engagement from the right people on your Instagram account shows that you have a connected audience that are going to be easier to sell to because they enjoy what you share.
But it’s also really important for the Instagram algorithm. Instagram’s algorithm tries its best to filter through all the content uploaded to Instagram on a daily basis to serve the most relevant posts to the most relevant people.
When you have someone engage with your post, this sends a signal to Instagram’s algorithm that your account is posting valuable content that people are clearly connecting with, and so it will be more likely to show your posts to more people. It’s also more likely to show more of your future posts to people who have engaged with your content too.
Further Reading: Simple Ways to Improve Your Instagram Engagement
How can I measure engagement?
When you’re trying to grow a following and an audience on Instagram, it’s important that you set yourself goals to achieve in terms of growth and engagement, so that you can stay on track and you have a way to measure what works and what doesn’t to help you move forward.
But where can you find this data?
Individual post insights
The easiest place to find information is within the individual posts themselves; you can click the ‘Insights’ link underneath the photo (make sure you have a Business account or Creator account in order to see post and account Insights!) and it will show you various stats about that post, including:
How many accounts/people it has ‘reached’ (how many people have seen it)
How many Likes it has
How many Comments
Shares
Saves
… and more!
Account insights
Or if you want a broader overview and a place where you can track your overall account numbers month to month or week to week, head over to your overall account insights, which can be found when you go to the 3 lines in the top right of your profile, and select ‘Insights’.
This has been updated recently so might look a little different to usual, but you can see Instagram has this new ‘Content Interactions’ section, which shows you your % growth or decline in interactions.
By Content Interactions, they obviously mean engagement, and within that they are including Likes, comments, saves and shares all together.
You can then tap into this section to find out more about how many specifically you’ve had in total in the last 7 days.
You could then track your growth in a spreadsheet or Trello board to keep an eye on your stats over time using these numbers.
Top performing posts
From within the Content Interactions section, you can then scroll down and tap on ‘Top performing posts’ to see a list of all your grid posts (or Stories, below that) based on whatever filter you’d like.
You can filter to show the top performing posts based on Likes, on Comments, on Saves, Shares, Reach and much more. And you can display posts from the last year, 2 years, 6 months, month, or 7 days etc.
The reason why this feature is great is because it allows you to see visually which posts are performing best in terms of engagement, so you can refine your strategy and create more of those to further enhance your engagement and growth.
Instagram management tool insights
If you use an Instagram Management tool (like later.com - my recommended Instagram planner and scheduler), they might also have more in-depth ways of seeing your post analytics.
One feature I really like in Later is the ability to see your hashtag performance, so I can literally see which hashtags are contributing to higher engaging posts or posts that give me more reach etc.
So that’s all the ways you can find out about your Instagram account engagement and how to measure it (plus why you might want to in the first place!).
