Instagram Engagement

Data originally featured in the  October 27, 2021 newsletter found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2021/10/inbox-insights-october-27-2021-data-driven-decision-making-reporting-issues-instagram-engagement/

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s take a look back at the year on Instagram for both brands and influencers. Outages, outrages, and thoroughly unpredictable events have defined the year thus far. What do we see when we examine how brands and influencers have fared?

Brands have had a nearly literal rollercoaster this year, starting at nearly 0.4% engagement and declining to about 0.23% now, a change of -42% within the year. What we don’t see here are many of the dire predictions made throughout the year about things like iOS 14.5 and the Great Facebook Outrage reflected long term.

Let’s look at influencers next.

Unlike brands that seemed to have a decent summer, influencers have seen a slow and steady decline all year long. At the beginning of the year, they started around 1.7% engagement, and they’ve fallen to just around 0.9% recently, a decline of 47%. Of note, the decline for influencers has accelerated as of the end of August.

Like its parent Facebook, Instagram is delivering diminishing results for both brands and influencers. Two years ago, influencers could expect engagement at nearly 2%; Facebook continues to turn the screws on everyone. (anyone who’s spent time on Instagram can testify to how many more ads they see, especially in Stories)

What should we take away from this? Facebook as a corporation is currently facing significant headwinds; desirable audiences can be found on many different platforms. If you’re not seeing great performance on Facebook, now may be time to change up your LinkedIn strategy and set up that Tiktok account to see what it’s all about. The watchword as we close out this year and head into next is diversification. Take some time to explore what’s out there.

Methodology: Trust Insights extracted data from Facebook’s Crowdtangle software for 2,415,624 posts from 7,731 brands and 1,382,389 posts from 10,436 influencers Instagram accounts. The timeframe of the data is January 1, 2021 – October 26, 2021. The date of study is October 27, 2021. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.