How to calculate Instagram engagement rates

If you want to see how well your content is performing, engagement rate is the social media marketing's gold standard.
The method of calculating your Instagram engagement rates depends on whether you’re doing it for your own account, or someone else’s.

For your own accounts

For an account you own or have access to (e.g. a client’s), you’ll be able to see all the post metrics, including likes, comments, shares, clicks, profile visits and more.

Engagements include:

• Likes
• Comments
• Shares to Story
• Saves/Bookmarks

(You can also include Profile Visits and Follows as well, but that’s up to you.)

We therefore combine all of the Engagement metrics and use Reach to calculate engagement rate:

Engagements divided by Reach, multiplied by 100 = Engagement Rate %

Here’s an example calculation from one of our recent posts that did better than average.

Should you use Reach or Impressions to calculate Instagram engagement rates?

We get this question a lot!

Reach is the number of individual people who saw your post, whereas Impressions are the number of times your post was viewed.

So if 10 people saw your post, that would be a Reach of 10.
But if one of those people saw the post 3 times, you would have 12 Impressions.

It’s completely up to you which metric you use to calculate Instagram engagement rates.

When we perform social media audits for clients and monitor our own content’s performance, we prefer to use Reach because it gives us a better idea of how far the content has gone, and tells us whether we used the right combination of hashtags.

For competitors and influencers

If you want to benchmark yourself against a competitor or see how much authority an influencer has beyond their follower count, your access to metrics is somewhat limited.

The only relevant metrics you can see are:

• Likes
• Comments
• Followers

So when calculating Instagram engagement rates for a competitor or influencer, you’re actually calculating the engagement rate from their followers, rather than from their audience like you would for your own account:

Engagements divided by Followers, multiplied by 100 = Engagement Rate %

Here’s how you would calculate the follower engagement rate for our own account, @superbsocial.co, using three of our most recent posts to produce an average.

Note that our follower account went up a bit between the first and last post, so the Follower count is from the time of the second post for accuracy.

However this isn’t always possible when analysing other people’s accounts, so you’ll probably have to use the current follower count to calculate Instagram engagement rates!

What’s a good engagement rate?

As of December 2019, the average Instagram engagement rate is 3%.

That’s for all types of accounts across the Instagram network, so if you want to see the benchmark for your industry/niche, you’ll need to get a spreadsheet open and start finding relevant accounts!

(Alternatively, we offer an Instagram influencer research package where we’ll do that for you)

Conclusion

So there you have it! You now know how to calculate Instagram engagement rates for yourself, your clients, competitors, and influencers.

What will you do with your new-found power?