If you’re using Instagram for business, you may know it’s more than just a platform for saving all your cutest photos. It’s an effective platform for building your brand and cultivating an audience online. With one billion people using Instagram every month, it’s a great social media platform with serious potential for ROI. However, to reap the rewards, you don’t just need an audience: you need Instagram engagement. You need comments, shares, likes, and different actions that show your content is compelling with the people who see it.
Importantly, engagement only has worth when it’s genuine — coming from real people who actually care.
This is the reason why you’re not going to find any ideas here about getting into an “engagement group” or “engagement pod” or buying likes or anything of that kind. The fact is: that just doesn’t work. (We should know! We tried it!)
The truth is, there’s no shortcut for quality engagement. You get out of social media what you put in. So take the time to craft that great post, encourage conversation, and connect genuinely with your followers. The advantages are sure to follow.
Read on for proven methods to make an impact with your Instagram audience and build strong, lasting engagement organically.
What do we mean by Instagram Engagement?
Engagement is more than counting your views or followers. It’s about measuring the interactions that your audience makes with your content.
On Instagram, engagement is measured by several metrics such as:
- Comments
- Shares
- Likes
- Saves
- Followers and growth
- Mentions (tagged or untagged)
- Branded hashtags
- Click-throughs
- DMs
Take a look at our complete list of social media metrics, and how to track them, here.
These sorts of actions are evidence that people aren’t just seeing your content. They’re actively keen on what you need to say.
Why can we care about engagement? First of all, it means that your content is making an effect on your audience. (They like you, they really like you!)
Secondly, strong engagement is a key to think about Instagram’s algorithm. The higher the engagement, the more likely it is that the content will be boosted in the newsfeed, attracting more eyes and attention.
So how do you measure engagement? Well, it depends on your brand’s goals and targets.
You’ll have access to those metrics we mentioned before. You should use Instagram’s Insights tool, or any of those different great Instagram analytics tools to collect that juicy, juicy data.
When you’ve received your stats on hand, use one of these Instagram engagement calculators and crunch those numbers to find your engagement rate.
What is an effective Engagement rate?
Your engagement rate measures the amount of interaction social content earns relative to your followers or reach.
In other words: what percentage of the people who saw your post really engaged with it?
There are just a few different ways to get to that number. You may calculate an engagement rate by impressions, by post, by reach, or by followers. It actually depends on your social media goals.
Instagram itself is coy about what a “good” engagement rate is. However, most social media marketing experts agree that strong engagement falls around 1% to 5%.
Of course, “good” is subjective. Your specific industry and community might have a very different number that marks success.
However no matter what your sweet spot is, check out some of the following tips for maximizing engagement.