What’s new with Instagram Engagement

This data was originally featured in the October 19, 2022 newsletter found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2022/10/inbox-insights-october-19-2022-self-care-at-events-instagram-engagement/

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s check in on Instagram engagement and see what’s changed. The last time we peeked, engagement rates were down across the board. What’s it looking like as we start to wind down 2022?

Let’s first take a look at brands. How have brands fared year to date?

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The low water mark was mid-July for brands; after that, we’re starting to see a bit more engagement, roughly 0.175%. That translates to 1 engagement for every 571 followers.

Next, let’s check in on influencers, individuals as opposed to brands:

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Influencers saw their engagement really slide in Q2, leveling off in mid-July. As with brands, they’ve seen a slow uptick in engagement, but not as steep an increase as brands. Right now, they’re hovering at roughly 0.625% engagement, or roughly 1 engagement per 160 followers. Given that many influencer accounts have followings in the hundreds of thousand or greater, this is still a sizeable amount of engagement.

When it comes to media types, how do things look for brands?

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All three media types show an increase in median engagement, with albums (carousels) still performing the best. In fact, albums perform at a little more than 2x better than videos and reels for brands. (this year, Instagram lumped videos and reels together in their data API)

What about for influencers?

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This was a surprising turn of events. We see that albums are increasingly engaged for influencers; individual photo posts holding mostly steady, and videos showing a median decrease in engagement. Something’s going on there – that’s unusual behavior. Looking at the performance of videos for individual influencers, we see a lot more variability as well; video engagement has peaks and troughs much higher than other media types.

So what? What do we do with this information? If we want to garner engagement as brands, albums remain the way to go on average. In the meantime, influencers still garner 3.5x more engagement than brands, so if your audience is on Instagram, influencer marketing should be part of your toolkit.

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