ENGAGEMENT RATES + HOW TO MAKE THEM MAKE SENSE
There is a lot of chat about Instagram engagement out there - what is considered good, bad, up, down, how engagement rates are calculated… but to be honest, there is *rarely* a consensus on the matter, which for some of us… can feel super confusing 🙋BACK IT UP, GALS… WHAT IS an ENGAGEMENT rate, AGAIN?
Engagement rates are a key indicator that we use to get a sense of how much your audience is loving your content. It is meant to be a measure of the perceived value of your content. To calculate engagement rate, the industry standard has been to combine the ways your audience interacts with your posts (via likes, comments, shares, and saves) and compare that against your follower size, like so...
There are different benchmarks based on following size, and there are different benchmarks for different industries. Finding concrete data on these ever-changing benchmarks can be tough, but often you see average engagement rates cited as 1-2%. The problem is... due to major changes to Instagram's backend, this method is both outdated and inaccurate 😬A BOLD STATEMENT - ALLOW US TO ELABORATE…
We know from repeated announcements from Instagram that there has been a shift towards using machine-learning algorithms with the goal of showing each user more of what they like to see. (Remember when everyone first lost their minds over the pivot from chronological feeds? The year was 2016 and it was a massive game changer!) The consequence of this has been that only a small percentage of your audience will see your content (which is a huge bummer) - quantified by a metric called “reach rate”. This number shows organic reach as a percentage of total followers; it varies by geographic location and follower size, and has the potential to fluctuate pretty wildly month to month, but the average reach rate for March 2022, as reported by Social Status, was 7.89%... This means on average, less than 8% of your followers will see your content in their feed!IN LIGHT OF THIS… WE HAVE A MORE ACCURATE WAY TO MEASURE ENGAGEMENT *SOUND THE ALARMS!*
When we look at engagement, we are trying to assess the value of the content we provide - we hope to understand how those who see the content interact with it. If only 8% of our followers have the opportunity to see the content, that means 92% of our followers don’t even get the opportunity to interact with it in the first place! So what's the solution? An update to the formula...
Looking at engagement as a function of reach, instead of followers, lets us know if content is valuable when it is being seen. using followers to calculate engagement is outdated - it doesn’t control for the algorithm’s impact on followers seeing the content
When we interpret analytics for our clients, we want to look holistically at metrics to put together the story of their account performance. Engagement rate (using reach) tells us how valuable the content is; changes in reach and reach rate tell us how this value - in concert with other factors like trends and the algorithm’s programming - translates into reaching our audience; and ultimately, these can best direct us on how to grow an account.