You’ll be able to continually reach more and more rightful audiences who would be interested in your brand by increasing your engagement. Thus, it will make your content get prioritized by Instagram Algorithm.

Okay, there’s much to cover, so let’s dive in!

What is Engagement?

An Engagement is any sort of interaction with content.

Engagement is more than counting your views or followers. It’s about measuring the interactions that your audience makes with your content.

Instagram engagement includes all the ways users can interact with your content — through likes, comments, shares, and saves. 

It means liking, saving, and messaging. Think of it as having a conversation in person with someone. You engage in the discussion, contribute, and appropriately acknowledge what they said and your reactions. You engage in what they are saying, and the conversation continues. 

Four Main Types of Engagement

These are the 4 most common and valuable types of engagement:

1. Likes – can be considered as a simple and helpful scorecard on the quality of the content you are posting. 
2. Comments – talking directly to your audience is vital to turning them into loyal customers. 
3. Share – Inspiring people to share your content is a cost-effective way of marketing.
4. Click Through – getting people to click a link on your content is a fundamental marketing goal and often the most valuable type of engagement. 

Other Instagram engagement metrics include:

• Saves
• DMs
• Link clicks/swipe-ups
• Mentions
• Hashtag usage
• Stories sticker interactions

These actions prove that people aren’t just seeing your content. They’re actively interested in what you have to say. 

Why Is Engagement Important to Sales

The term engagement within marketing is part of a sales strategy—this is one of the methods of attracting followers to your brand. Engagement is used as the tool through which marketers entice users to connect to their products.

Engagement makes the sales process more consistent and frees up time for things that can’t be automated, like building relationships. Better engagement creates stronger connections between your audience and your brands. This gives you more opportunities to build brand loyalty, increase word-of-mouth recommendations, and increase sales. By effectively engaging with your target consumers in your content, you will be able to attract their attention and have them curious about your products or services. By simply giving attention to something in any form, a relationship has begun to form between the followers and the brand. 

Why Do We Care About Engagement? 

Engagement is probably one of the trends we’re seeing today that we may not be paying enough attention to. When you’re inundated with retention tips, it’s time to listen. 

Engagement works, so it’s getting a lot of attention these days. It helps inspire brand enthusiasm and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. If you do, you are on the right track. You’re still missing an opportunity if you quit here or don’t work on engagement at all. Excitement, satisfaction, and retention aren’t the only ways customer retention benefits your business. 

According to the study of PWC, organizations using digital outreach techniques anticipate more significant revenue growth. Another research from Bain & Company found that highly engaged customers spend 20% to 40% more than others.

Schaffer and Debb (2020) revealed in their study that Instagram use has been essential in stimulating the growth and development of small businesses as it enhances the linkage between customers and business owners hence facilitating the increase of sales. 

Whether using social media, online community platforms, or email communication, higher customer engagement means more customer spending and more revenue per customer. 

How Does Engagement Affect Your Sales?

Instagram continues to grow and evolve as a marketing platform, and it’s more important than ever for businesses to build effective Instagram marketing strategies. And that means having a thorough understanding of the Instagram marketing landscape and measurable insights into what works and what doesn’t.

Starting to monitor engagement rates for your Instagram account and individual posts may seem like an extra step for your business, but doing so has some great benefits.

1. Attract New Customers 

Achieving excellent engagement means your business is more likely to attract new customers. How? As people like, comment, and share your posts, they improve your Instagram account and help new customers discover your business.

2. Conduct Market Research

Monitoring engagement rates can also be a straightforward way to conduct primary market research to understand your customers and their interests better. Take a look at the Instagram posts with the highest engagement rates to understand the content and topics most interesting to your customers. Keep those topics in mind as you manage the creation of your content calendar.

3. Prioritize Social Media Efforts

By measuring engagement rates on Instagram and understanding which types of content and posts generally work best, you can prioritize your social media efforts. For example, if your Instagram videos have the highest engagement rate, you know you need to create more video content.

4. Provide Credibility

Focusing on how many followers you have without striving to maintain a high engagement rate is detrimental to your business. Customers pay attention to these things. If your account has many followers but not many people commenting or liking your posts, your customers may wonder if you have fake followers. It helps increase the credibility of your business to your customers. How you engage with your audience will strengthen the audience to pay attention. Instagram engagement offers social proof of your business. It is so powerful that it can provide the same kind of social proof as a testimonial from a satisfied customer. This will makes people more likely to purchase your product or services.

5. Increase Sales

How much does Instagram engagement rate affect sales? When customers love and interact with your social media content, you can increase your sales in two ways. First, frequent engagement with content puts your business at the center of your customers. Second, having quality Instagram content that users love gives customers confidence that your products and services are also high quality and more likely to purchase. Businesses can use Instagram engagement to improve their marketing strategies and also encourages a potential client to start conversations with you. Over time, those conversations become the foundation of their perception of your brand and greatly influence purchase decisions.

6. It can help create a community among followers, encouraging users to return and share content.

When it comes to Instagram marketing, building a community is critical. A thriving community provides an engaged audience that can help spread the word about your business and its products or services.

The more you engage in liking and commenting on other accounts’ photos and reply to the comments on your own will likely increase your involvement in their conversation, encounter new accounts, and be seen as one of the group. You can perceive that Instagram is more likely to show the content to a broad customer, and you can engage more in the community.

There are so many types of Instagram engagements, but not all engagements are equally crucial to your business. Prioritize high engagement rates on Instagram so your business can understand its customers better, connect with new customers more often, and, most importantly, drive more sales!

Instagram Engagement Rate: What is it?

Engagement Rate (or ER) is the percentage of people who saw a piece of content or ad and engaged with it. 

Instagram Engagement Rate is a quantitative measure of how users interact with the content on your Instagram profile. 

It considers your number of likes, comments, followers, and shares. Engagement rates are calculated by dividing an account’s likes and comments by the follower count.

Engagement Rate shows you:

1. How often are people engaging with content
2. How fast people are engaging with content
3. Which content is most interesting
4. Which content is being noticed the most

Tracking your engagement rate is one of the best tools to identify which content types interest your audience the most. You can easily resonate more of that content into your strategy once you pinpoint what works best for your audience, 

Numbers prove whether or not your strategies are making a difference to your brand. Going through all the numbers and graphs may sound overwhelming, and you most likely hate doing it. To feel more prepared to deal with the data, you must figure out which metrics to focus on. 

Instagram notices if you have high engagement rates on your posts. They’ll be more likely to showcase your posts to users who consistently engage with your content, which means better reach. It can help with engagement, creating a positive upwards spiral that enables you to gain momentum on the platform.

Engagement & The Algorithm

As mentioned, engagement is a huge factor in working Instagram algorithms. But how do these two work hand in hand?

The Instagram algorithm dictates the order of the posts users see when scrolling through their feeds. It decides what content shows up. It prioritizes the best posts, pushing the most relevant ones toward the top and giving them the most visibility, while other content ends up being placed further down or never gets seen. 

Increased engagement increases the chance of being seen by the algorithm, which can significantly increase sales and profits by directing content to the people most likely to buy products or services. 

Engagement is vital to spark connections with your audience and increase your sales. People become followers because your brand is a trendsetter, you’re famous in their social circle, or you provide valuable content.

The Differences Between Instagram Algorithms of Stories, Feed, Explore, and Reels

The Instagram algorithm isn’t a single algorithm but uses various algorithms, classifiers, and processes, each with its purpose. This means each part of the app uses its algorithm. This ranking system ensures that users’ experience is significantly personalized according to their preferences.

Instagram Algorithm of Feed and Stories

The ranking process for these two is all about the recent posts shared by the people you follow. Instagram will take all the information about who made the post, what the post was about, and your preferences. These are called “signals.” After gathering all the specific signals, the Instagram algorithm then uses the data to prioritize posts. 

In Feed, Algorithm looks at the five interactions closely. It gathers information on how likely you are to spare your time on a post, comment on it, like it, save it, reshare it, and tap on the profile photo. The more you engage, the higher possibility you’ll see the post. 

Instagram Algorithm of Explore Tab 

Explore’s algorithm works differently. It was designed to help you discover new things. When you click on explore tab, it directs you to a grid that is made of recommendations. Opposite from Feeds and Stories, these photos and videos are from the accounts you don’t follow. 

To narrow down which post to rank for your explore page, the Instagram algorithm will look at the signals, like what post you’ve liked, saved, and commented on in the past. It will then look at who else likes the post and what other accounts those people are interested in. 

Instagram Algorithm of Reels

The purpose of reels is to entertain users. Like Explore, most of what you see is from the accounts you don’t follow. Algorithm source reels that you might like, and then rank them based on how interesting they are to you. 

In Reels, Algorithm focuses on what might entertain you. It makes a prediction based on how likely you are to watch a Reel all the way through. 

What Is a Good Instagram Engagement Rate?

Instagram engagement rate is one of the most important metrics to watch. It plays a vital role in Instagram’s algorithm and can tell a great deal about your post’s performance.

Engagement rate may vary significantly by industry. However, studies have shown that solid engagement falls around 1% to 5%. A good engagement rate can serve as a benchmark for your business. 

Why does a good Instagram Rate Matter?

• If you have a high engagement rate, your audience likely sees you as a relevant source of information. 
• They may favor your content over competitors because your content sets you apart.
• These new users will take notice of your engagement — your followers, likes, and comments, and this will decide whether or not to follow you.

How to Calculate Instagram Rate

The formula to measure Instagram engagement for a post is to add the likes and comments you get per post, divide that by the number of followers you have, and multiply that by 100. 

See formula: