6 Ways to Increase Your Engagement Rate on Instagram

Engagement is more important than audience size. Change my mind.

Three years ago, all the focus was on the size of an influencer’s audience — how many Instagram “followers” they had. Brands and marketers alike assumed that with more followers, meant more earned for every dollar spent, or so they thought.

As marketers navigated their way through the complex jungle of influencer marketing, a new important metric emerged: the engagement rate (ER).

An ER measures how much of an audience is engaged with an influencer’s content. A low ER is a reason for concern, yet the cause of which could be a number of things.

Before I tell you how to increase your ER, I’ll lay out some of the main factors in what can cause it to be low.

1. Bot or inactive followers
2. Poor quality content
3. Posting too often
4. Not providing value
5. Number of followers

To calculate your ER, you can use one of the free Instagram tools such as the MightyScout engagement rate calculator. It’s calculated by adding together your comments and likes and dividing it by your follower count — usually given as a result of the average ER over the last 30 posts.

While a 2.5% ER for an influencer with 2,500 followers would be considered low, it’d be…