What is engagement rate?
Also called: ER · Instagram engagement rate
Engagement rate
The share of an account's followers who interact with a typical post, expressed as a percentage of likes and comments divided by follower count.
Engagement rate is the standard way to compare accounts of different sizes. A brand with 50,000 followers and 2,000 likes a post is doing something a brand with 5 million followers and 20,000 likes is not, and only a rate makes that visible.
The figure falls as an account grows, bigger audiences are less uniformly interested, so a 3% rate on a small account and a 0.5% rate on a very large one can represent equally healthy communities. Compare within a category and a size band, never against a single global benchmark.
How we calculate it
We divide the average likes plus comments on an account's recent posts by its follower count. Both halves come from the same profile fetch, so the rate is internally consistent even on the day a brand gains a large number of followers.
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