With over 800 million monthly active users, Instagram is one of the world's most popular social media platforms. It is a photo-sharing app that allows users to upload pictures and short videos and share them with their followers. The use of Instagram has increased exponentially in recent years with celebrities such as Kim Kardashian being among the most followed people. Its popularity has also been attributed to its ability to be used as a marketing tool for businesses, influencers, and bloggers on the platform.

The rise of the influencer marketing industry has caused an increase in demand for influencers. Brands are willing to pay higher fees for influencers because they have proven to be more effective than other types of advertising. But, It is important to choose the right influencers for your brand. The influencer should be able to represent the product and have a following that aligns with a target demographic. The best way to find the right influencer is by doing research on them and their audience.

Metrics to measure the influence of an influencer

There are many ways to analyze influencers. The most common are

1. Followers or Subscribers

It represents the total count of people following an influencer. Based on the count, influencers are categorized into micro, nano, macro & mega.

Nano: 1K - 10K followers

Micro: 10K - 100K followers

Macro: 100K - 1M followers

Mega: 1m+ Followers

2. Engagement Rate

The engagement rate is the ratio of likes, shares, and comments on a post to the total number of followers. This is the primary metric used to qualify influencers.

3. Reach

In influencer marketing, It measures how the brand message travels through influencers. Either one of the interactions such as a like, comment, view, or share contributes to the reach metric. An approximate way to calculate the reach is

4. Audience Affinity

Influencer marketing is publishing a brand’s message to its audience through an influencer’s voice. If the brand’s targeted audience doesn’t intersect with the influencer audience, the ROI of the campaign will decline. So it’s essential to ensure whether there is some intersection between the audiences. There are multiple ways of estimating it, one way is to contact the influencer to share the audience insights provided by Instagram. Another way is using influencer analytics tools to analyze audience attributes.

We recommend checking out impulze.ai profile analytics to estimate influencer audience attributes.

How to calculate the engagement rate of an influencer

Engagement rate is a metric that measures the percentage of followers who have interacted with an influencer's content. Theoretically, it’s a ratio of total engagement to followers. Here is how we calculate it.

Avg. Likes = Average Likes received per “N” Posts

Avg. Comments = Average Comments received per “N” Posts

Note: We add more weightage to comments than likes, as comments represent a higher degree of engagement. “N” is the number of posts considered.

How to instantly calculate Instagram engagement rate

Doing the above math, every time while assessing an influencer is complex. So here is how you can instantly calculate engagement on Instagram itself.

1. Install SocialiQ

SocialiQ is a free browser extension that helps you to calculate engagement rate instantly on Instagram itself. Click here to install SocialiQ

2. Open the influencer profile on Instagram and click the SocialiQ icon

3. View engagement rate and other metrics instantly.

4. See engagement rate for individual posts also.

Here is a video on how to use this tool for analyzing influencers

Average engagement by influencer category

Deciding between good and bad engagement needs an index that declares engagement reference to the influencer category. 2% engagement for an influencer with a follower size of 100k is almost equal to 10% engagement for an influencer with a follower size of 20k. Here is an index that shares the Average engagement rate by influencer category.

1k- 5k >= 5.60%

5k - 20k >=2.43%

20k -100k >=2.15%

100k - 1m >=2.05%

1m+ >= 1.97%

SocialiQ also handles this calculation as well and marks a profile “good”, “average“ and “bad“. See how it does.

Conclusion

Engagement rate is only one of the primary metrics to evaluate an influencer. In order to deeply understand influencers, brands need to consider factors such as audience, reach, etc.. to drive better decisions on influencer selection.

If you are someone looking for an affordable influencer marketing platform, check out impulze.ai