A Guide to Common Acronyms and Slang for digital content creators and Influencers

What Does Engagement Mean On Instagram? 

What Does Engagement Mean?

In social media, engagement is an umbrella term used to describe how much your audience interacts with your content. This could be likes, comments, sharing, and more depending on the social platform.

If you are creating digital content, looking at your engagement is important to understand your audience, your reach, and how well you are doing as a content creator. 

Engagement is a broad term, meaning you could have high engagement on one post and low engagement on another. This doesn’t necessarily mean you are failing or succeeding as an influencer, but looking at averages over time can help you secure brand deals and continue posting content your audience wants. 

Engagement on Instagram

So, since engagement can vary from social media platform, what does engagement mean on Instagram?

If you have a Professional Account on Instagram, you can easily track your engagement, reach, and your overall insights on posts and stories. 

Simply click on a photo and hit ‘view insights’ to see all of your statistics. 

On this particular post, 110 accounts engaged with the content. Instagram even breaks this into if the accounts are following you or not. This is a great way to see how people are seeing your content – if you have a lot of people viewing your posts who aren’t following you, this could mean you are being shared more or being featured on the Explore page. 

You will also be able to see the exact post interactions, such as likes, comments, saves, and shares. 

To see more detailed information, you can also view your professional dashboard – this will allow you to see your engagement as a whole, not just individual posts.  

Below are some examples of the data you can reciece when looking at your engagement statitics. 

As you can see from the photo above, you can see how many accounts you have engaged in the past week, 30 days, or 90 days. This is an average for all your posts and stories within the past timeframe. This can give you a better idea of if your account is growing or staying stagnant. 

You can also view the location, gender, and age range of the accounts you have engaged with. This can be great information to keep for when you are working with brands, as it gives you the exact information you need to describe your audience.

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Difference between Reach Vs. Engagement Vs. Impressions

People often get the words reach, engagement, and impressions mixed up when talking about their social media stats. So, here’s a quick way to remember which is which.

Your reach on Instagram is the amount of people who have viewed your content. This is based on individual people or accounts. So, your account can have a reach of 50, which means 50 individual people viewed that post.

Your impressions on Instagram are the amount of times a post has been viewed in total. This means that if a singular person clicks on your story 100 times, your impressions will still be 100, because it is counting total clicks, not individual accounts. View our Impressions article for more detail.

Engagement is simply the umbrella term for both of these terms.

How to Caculate Engagement Rate as an Influencer

It’s important you know the difference between all these terms, especially when reaching out to brands. A good way to do this is by calculating your engagement rate. 

You can find an online calculator to calculate your engagement rate, such as the one linked above, or you can also do the math yourself with several different formulas. 

One formula you can use to caculate your engagement rate is dividing your total number of engagements per post by your reach per post, then multiply the result by 100.

(Remember, all this information is available in your professional dashboard.)

So, for example, if your total number of engagements per post is 100, and your reach per post is 3000, your engagement rate would be 3.3%.

Many social media experts say that any engagement rate between 2-5% is a very good rate.

You can also divide total likes + comments on a post by your followers and multiply by 100 to get another rate. Make sure to use the same formula each time so your results are the same. 

What social media terms would you like to learn about next? Let us know down below.