If you're posting content on Instagram and getting a couple of heart hits along with a few comments off and on, then there's something wrong. If your audience is not engaging with your posts and stories, then you need to revisit your content strategy and pivot it to align with what your audience wants to see. Tweaking your content to improve Instagram engagement on your posts will grow your account, audience, and brand. This blog will dive into why it is important to calculate Instagram engagement, how to do it, and proven tips to grow engagement rates.
Let's get started.
In this blog:
- What is Instagram Engagement? How Do You Calculate Instagram Engagement? Actionable Tips To Improve Instagram Engagement How To Use Instagram For Mark
- What is Instagram Engagement?
- How Do You Calculate Instagram Engagement?
- Actionable Tips To Improve Instagram Engagement
- How To Use Instagram For Mark
What is Instagram Engagement?
Instagram engagement refers to the activity your audience performs after consuming your content; likes, comments, shares, following an account, and more. This is a key metric that tells the algorithm that your content strategy is aligning with your audience and delivering value to them.
That's fine, but what does that mean for you, as a business or brand?
Well, more engagement will push the algo to push your content to a wider audience - increasing its reach, gaining more followers, and raising brand awareness. All this contributes to the growth and scale of your business and brand; which is the core objective of your marketing efforts, right?
Let's now learn how to calculate Instagram engagement in the right way to make the right decisions and win the game.
How To Calculate Instagram Engagement?
While many businesses want to gauge their Instagram engagement to find if their content is resonating with their audience - an overwhelmingly large majority simply ignores it. Result?
Most of them are just hitting the arrows in the dark and hoping it works. Honestly speaking, this is a marketing blunder to commit that costs more than just the marketing budget - it damages their brand reputation, and repels the potential customers who might become their raving fans otherwise.
There are many ways to gauge Insta engagement. Businesses may use, an Instagram engagement rate calculator to get a precise idea about this vital metric, as well.
Let's explore a few ways to do that:
Formula#1:
This formula considers likes, comments, and the total number of followers of an account to give an engagement rate. Here's the formula:
Engagement = (Likes + Comments) / Followers X 100
This formula might give useful insight into your competitors' accounts and if their content marketing is going on the right track. If that is the case, you can model their content to achieve similar or bigger results.
Also, if you're looking to collaborate with popular influencers in your niche, using this formula will give you a rough idea of whether the influencer is the right fit or not.
Formula#2:
Some argue that the number of followers is not the right data to gauge an account's engagement rate. Since a lot of followers are the least active, this will lead to inaccurate data.
Here comes the second formula to give more dependable data;
Engagement = (Likes + Comments + Saves) / Impressions X 100
Since this formula takes into account the actual number of people who have viewed your posts and decided to interact or not; you'll have more accurate data and hence take the right marketing strategies.
Actionable Tips To Improve Instagram Engagement
Here are a few proven tips to help improve your Instagram marketing gains and scale further:
Take Great Pictures
Since Instagram is a visual-first platform, you should post great photos or don't publish at all. Posting pixelated or low-quality images can damage your brand more than anything else can. Why? It's because Instagrammers see your image posts first, and then decide whether to engage with them or just move on to the next content piece in their feed.
Win With Engaging Captions
Using captions (on-screen and in-description) is an amazing way to tell engaging stories and attract your ideal audience.People love stories and they love to like, comment, and share content that tells relevant stories they could connect with. A lot of content creators and marketing teams are looking at how to gain followers on Instagram.
A user will hit the follow button only if they see value in your content. Unless you're producing the right content that appeals to your audience, they're always going to scroll up the feed to find something interesting.
Use Latest Features
Using the latest features gives you the leverage to gain maximum visibility and growth that you can't have otherwise. IGTV (Instagram TV) and Instagram Reels are fairly new features launched by Instagram to allow its users to post video content and engage their audience even more.
Like every social app does with a new feature, Instagram is giving an extra push to these new features. This offers an untapped opportunity to businesses get a boost in the impressions and engagement for their content.
Get Featured On Explore Page
Instagram recommends us the content on its Explore page that it thinks we might be interested in. Most of the content that we see on our Explore page is from new accounts that we haven't followed yet.
This means getting featured on the Explore page will get us more visibility, more reach, and more engagement. So, as a business, it should be your priority to get on Explore page and get enhanced discoverability and engagement.
How To Use Instagram For Marketing
Instagram is an amazing social medium to find, engage, and market to your target audience. Here are a few key steps to use Instagram for marketing your business and grow sales:
Use Hashtags: Hashtags increase your discoverability on Instagram. Using the relevant hashtags will give you more impressions and hence more engagement.
Ride On Trends: Using trending sounds, themes, and events help get you more impressions.
Take Good Photos: You should always use good-quality pictures for better branding, user experience, and credibility.
Use Reels: Reels are vertical short videos that are extremely popular on the platform. Use reels to market and launch new campaigns.
Create Valuable Content: Based on the desires, problems, or aspirations of your target audience, you need to publish valuable content that they want to see. This is perhaps the biggest factor that will improve Instagram engagement and followers.
Write Engaging Captions: Use captions to tell compelling stories that represent your brand and the people behind it. It connects your audience with your brand and increases engagement and conversions.
Give CTA: Whether you create educational, inspirational, or commercial content; you should always use a call-to-action (like this video, write in the comments section, follow our page, click the link in the bio, etc.).
As a creator, you should focus on creating engaging interactive posts no matter what type of content you are producing (text-only posts, image posts, Reels, IGTV, IG Stories, etc).
Final Words
This blog has explained the why and how of calculating and improving Instagram engagement to help grow your brand on the platform. Did you learn something that you think would be a key role-player in your next marketing move? Or maybe we've missed something that we should have included in this blog. In any case, we would love to hear from you in the comments section below.