It’s no longer the number of followers or just the number of likes that brands are fighting for – it’s engagement. On Instagram, as well as on other social media platforms, an engaged community is now the measure of success. That’s why you need to know how to easily measure your engagement.

See how to calculate the engagement rate on Instagram – both for your profile as well as your competitors’.

Why is engagement an important metric?

As we stated at the beginning, metrics such as likes or followers are now perceived as vanity metrics. That means increasing them won’t mean much for your overall brand success and won’t bring you closer to achieving your goals.

Having decent engagement, on the other hand, indicates that you’ve managed to gather a group of people interested in your brand and products. Those people are more likely than anyone else to choose your offer in the future. That’s why, when running social media channels, you should first focus on the engagement before you start counting profits. It’s unlikely that unknown people will start buying your products and recommending them to others.

If your content resonates with your Instagram followers, it’s the first step toward turning them into your customers, and eventually ambassadors.

How is the engagement rate calculated?

Social media analytics tools, including Sotrender, usually use a unified formula for calculating the engagement rate.

In Sotrender, Engagement Rate (ER) is counted as the total sum of all users’ actions divided by the number of total followers a profile has, multiplied by 100.

How do you interpret your ER result? In general, the higher the engagement rate, the more effective your content strategy is with your audience.

What is a good engagement rate on Instagram?

That being said, you also need to know that the bigger the account (precisely speaking, the follower base), the harder it will be to have a satisfying level of engagement. Usually, smaller accounts and micro-influencers have much higher engagement than larger ones, such as celebrities. This is mostly because it’s easier for users to identify with smaller accounts, where their voice is heard.

Engagement rates among Instagram influencers worldwide from 2018 to 2021, by number of followers, source

When it comes to the numbers, it’s assumed that an engagement rate over 5% is a great result. You can also be proud of yourself if the engagement on the profile you run is between 1% and 5%.

How to calculate your engagement rate on Instagram

The good news is that you actually don’t even have to calculate this metric on your own. If you decide to use a social media analytics tool such as Sotrender, everything will be automatically calculated for you.

In case you want to calculate engagement on your own, you can use the formula described above.

Where to get the engagement rate from? 

Getting any social media data from a third-party analytics tool is pretty straightforward and won’t take more than a few minutes. 

Based on the Sotrender example, here is what you should do to discover your engagement rate result:

1. Create an account.
2. Connect an Instagram profile you’d like to analyze.
3. Wait for the data to download.
4. Head to the Reach and engagement section, which is where you’ll find engagement rate.

There you’ll see:

• The engagement rate day-by-day in the selected time period.
• The total engagement rate for this period of time.
• The day with the best engagement in this period of time.

Engagement rate measured in Sotrender

How to calculate engagement rate for other Instagram profiles

In Sotrender, checking the engagement rate for a profile you don’t own looks exactly the same as checking this metric for your own profile.

1. If you haven’t analyzed a selected profile before, add it to your account by clicking the orange ‘plus’ button.
2. Select a profile from your list.
3. Head to the Reach and engagement section, like you did before.

You can calculate the engagement rate on Instagram for any profile

You can also create a comparison group to compare the engagement rate for a few profiles at a time.

From there you can either analyze the total engagement metric for the selected profiles or track how the engagement rate looked day-by-day.

Tracking engagement rate for a few profiles

Usually, the bigger the profile, the smaller its engagement – but not in this case. Glossier has an extremely engaged community, so it’s definitely worth delving deeper into their strategy.

Engagement rate on Instagram

Pro tip
By clicking the peak of a selected day on the chart, you can immediately see what was posted then – it’s an effective way to understand which content is most interesting to the specific target audience.

By creating a comparison group, you’ll quickly learn which profile has the highest engagement rate, and why. This is something you won’t be able to discover just by scrolling through competitors’ profiles.

How to check influencers’ engagement rates?

It actually doesn’t matter whose Instagram profile you’d like to analyze more thoroughly, because in Sotrender you can track stats for any Instagram profile, including influencers.

Apart from analyzing your own data, checking the engagement rate will be useful in the following scenarios:

1. When you consider working with an Instagram influencer and you have to decide who will be best for your brand. Checking influencers’ engagement rates should be one of the key factors you look at.
2. When doing competitor research. Is your competitors’ strategy more effective than yours? How do they engage their audience? Which of their posts are at the top? As Instagram competitor analysis is something that you should do regularly (e.g., quarterly), it’s worth considering automating this task.
3. When setting your KPIs and goals. Especially if you’re not a very experienced marketer yet, you’ll need some benchmarks to base your decisions on. By looking at the engagement rate on other profiles, it’ll be much easier to assess what you are able to achieve and what KPIs you should measure along the way.

Track your engagement rate like a pro

We hope you’re now aware that tracking your engagement rate is important and that you can measure your engagement on a regular basis without much effort.

In 2024, you shouldn’t worry any longer about how to calculate engagement rate on Instagram, but rather how to create content that will be engaging and appealing to your Instagram followers.

Good luck!