Instagram can be a great way to get in front of now well over 300 million people (updated to 400 active monthly users as of September, 2015), it surpassed Twitter last year. So it was important for Dasheroo to provide free Instagram analytics for your dashboards! So what is engagement when it comes to Instagram? Simple: it’s the number of Likes and Comments divided by the number of followers you have. Why is your Instagram engagement rate important? It’s a great tool to compare other social networks to find what really works for your business.

Last year Social Bakers did a fantastic study. They measured the top 25 ‘most engaging brand profiles’ engagement on social networks. The winner? Instagram by a LOT!

On a per post basis Instagram posts generated a 3.31% per follower engagement rate! That’s huge when you compare it to the average Twitter engagement rate of .07%. It’s almost 50 times more engagement per follower than other social networks.

Forrester also had a great study that found close to the same, they studied 3 million user interactions with more than 2,500 brand posts and discovered that Instagram posts generated a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21%, or 58 times more engagement per follower than other social networks.

But what does this tell you? We wanted to see how it was working for us and although our Instagram following is small we wanted to see it compared to Twitter. Although it might not be statistically valid, it’s directional and we’ll probably put more oomph into Instagram.

One big note here, Twitter is in the top 10 traffic driver to the Dasheroo site while Instagram is far from that so if you’re down with it being great branding and less transactional (posting a link is a pain) then make sure you add it to your social media marketing!

P.S. Don’t forget to check out your Ultimate Instagram analytics dashboard at Dasheroo, you can track all of your social media analytics too!