One of the most common questions people ask about Instagram is, "What is the average engagement rate on Instagram?". The question is trickier to answer than you might think, as several factors determine the average engagement rate. Your industry, location, follower-base, and content can all determine the average rate for you.
What Is Instagram Engagement Rate?
Engagement Rate – or ER – is a social media benchmark that has become an industry-standard over time. Engagement Rate offers a measurement of how effective your posts on Instagram are and will give you an idea of how much of your audience engages with your content.
How to Calculate an Instagram Engagement Rate
The easy way to work out your engagement rate is to divide your likes and comments by your number of followers. That means having to go through all your posts to count the number of interactions, which is sure to take up a lot of time and effort.
The good news is that Engagement Rate calculators exist, and they can help a lot. These calculators do all of the hard work for you and offer insights, such as how real people made many comments and likes on posts.
What is the Average Instagram Engagement Rate?
HypeAuditor crunched the numbers on over 4 million Instagram accounts, including business and influencer accounts. The accounts were grouped together into five categories based on the number of followers they had. The result was that the ER depends on the number of followers. Accounts with a high number of followers generally had lower engagement rates.
The study showed that the average Instagram engagement rate is 2.84%. The average number doesn't mean too much, however, as the number can vary depending on followers. If an account has 4,000 followers and a 3% engagement rate, then that would be a low number. The engagement rate should be over 5% for an account like that.
When comparing your Instagram engagement rate to the average, be sure to compare to the average for your industry and accounts of your size. This will give you the best picture of how your account compares to the rest.
Generally, anything below 2% is low, and anything above 3% is high.
How to Increase Engagement Rate
Now that you know more about average Instagram engagement rates and how to work them out, you might be wondering if you can do better. You might want to know how to take your performance metrics and use them to create actionable tactics to boost engagement.
It can be challenging to interpret your results and engagement, but it gets easier if you've got something to compare it to. The industry benchmarks and average engagement will give you plenty of room to work around and create a development goal that works best for you.
If you noticed that your stories have a lower completion rate than the competition, for example, then you can correlate that information against other metrics. Look at how many stories you post per day or the kinds of stories that you post. Do you need to post more stories? Could uploading more stories boost your reach? Maybe you need to be posting fewer images and more videos to increase your reach.
The trick is to look past the numbers as they are. Put together new posting schedules and experiment with different formats and ideas and see what results you get from your new tactics. From there, you can further refine your goals until you get the exact results you want.
Here are some other tactics on how to increase engagement;
1. Regularly Engage with Similar Accounts
Engaging with other accounts could be the key to increasing engagement for your account. One of the first rules of Instagram is that engagement begets engagement. Interacting with people with accounts like yours improves your chances of being noticed by others. The more engagement you give, the more visible your own account becomes, which leads to more engagement with your profile.
2. Engage for 15 Minutes Before and After Posting
You should aim to get as much engagement as you can right away – within an hour of making a post. How can you generate that kind of attention so quickly? Well, one tactic is to engage with other people just before and just after making a post. This gives your new post the best chance of being seen by people coming to your account because you visited theirs. This gives your new post more visibility and improves average engagement.
3. Use Strategic Hashtags
Hashtags can make or break any post on social media, and Instagram is no different. Use the right hashtags, in particular specific long-tail hashtags, that are better reflections of the content. Use hashtags that reflect your content so people will find it when they look for something similar.
4. Write Engaging Captions
Instagram posts generate more engagement when they have captions. Captions also encourage people to look at your posts for longer. Adding a caption gives the photo some extra context, and showcases your personality. It also lets you include a call-to-action, such as asking users a question or encouraging them to tag their friends.
Here's a post about how to write the perfect Instagram caption.
5. Post at the Right Time
If you aren't sure when the right time for you to post is, there's never been a better time to find out. You should make your posts at a time when your posts get the most engagement on average. Several online services can help you work out the best time to post for you, or you could look through metrics and find it on your own.
Conclusion
The average Instagram engagement rate can depend on a variety of factors, so don't worry if yours doesn't meet the average. Compare yourself to accounts with a similar audience to get a better picture of where you stand. Follow the tips above to boost engagement and take your account to the next level.