The Instagram Metric the Matters
Let’s talk about numbers. It may not be the sexy part of running your business, but hey the numbers help us understand the impact of what we do.
Instagram Insights
When you look at the insights for your latest post on Instagram, there is probably 6-7 areas that have different labels and different numbers and to be honest, it can be really overwhelming. Combine that with the change in algorithm and the fact that “likes” are no longer king...you may be left scratching your head.
So let’s define these numbers:
Interactions: the number of actions taken when people engage with your post.
Impressions: the total number of times your post has been seen.
Reach: the number of unique accounts that have seen your post.
Follows: the number of accounts that started following you from that post.
♥: the number of likes your post got.
Now that’s cool and all but you still don’t know which one is most important, or which one matters the most do you? I’ll let you in on a secret, none of them. The one that is most important…...Engagement Rate.
Engagement Rate
Your engagement rate reflects how much people interact with the content and in an age of less and less dedicated followers, your engagement rate is key to understanding what content your audience wants.
So how do you calculate your engagement rate?
To be honest, there is some controversy over this and I don’t follow the formula most do. The formula you’ll see all over people’s website is to combine comments and likes and divide it by how many followers you have. The issue with this, your followers aren’t the only people seeing your content. Instead, I recommend using the number of impressions.
Impressions over followers. . . why?
Your engagement rate is to help you assess the effectiveness of your content; therefore, you want to know how many people who saw the post, interacted with it. There really is no point calculating your engagement rate for how many people could have seen it. There are many factors that influence if a “follower” sees your content or not and with the algorithms sometimes your followers don’t even see your content.
Conclusion
Your engagement rate tells you much more than just likes or impressions because it provides context. Let’s say you have a post that gets 10 likes and the next one gets 50. Without any context, you could be left scratching your head to figure out why one got so many likes and the other didn’t. When you look at the impressions, you are given a better context to how many people saw the post which gives you a better understanding of the true level of engagement your content is receiving.
Happy Instagramming!
