How to Increase Your Follower Engagement Rate

Don’t ever believe that becoming an influencer is easy. While some people may gain the status purely due to the quality of their content, most influencers must work hard to build a following and then remain relevant. Many influencers spend a surprising amount of time engaging with and managing their follower community.

It’s important to remember that people call apps like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube social media for a reason. These apps are inherently designed for people to be social. No matter whether you’re a large-scale influencer, or a newbie just setting up your social account, you need to engage regularly. And there is little point in building up an account with high numbers of followers if they don’t engage with you. No matter what size you are, you should allocate some time each week to managing your follower community.

Where to Find My Follower Engagement Rate?

Often times, engagement rate is not easy to find on Instagram. Especially when you are having more than 1,000 followers. Yet, this information is very important as to see if your followers are truly engaging with you.

If you are a successful Instagrammer (or YouTuber), you can use SocialBook to check your own engagement statistics, comparing them with others in your niche, and work out how you can improve your engagement.

For this time, we will take Kim Kardashian and Foxfell (Amanda Alice Forman) as an example to show you how data is important for managing your channel. If you haven’t sign up SocialBook, you can always do so and view the data relating to any other potential influencer (including yourself).

Kim Kardashian, with 128.7 million followers, clearly is a celebrity / mega-influencer. Foxfell, with 319,000 followers, would be better described as a mid-tier influencer (bigger than a micro-influencer, smaller than a macro-influencer).

Top Commenters Statistic

Towards the bottom of each page, you will see a section headed Top Commenters. This block highlights the people who have commented most on the Instagrammer’s posts. Clearly, really engaged influencers will regularly comment on their own posts, keeping the conversation going with their keen followers. You would expect most people to be the top commenter on their own page.

When you look at the SocialBook analytics for Kim Kardashian's Instagram channel, you don’t see her name listed here, though. Being a celebrity / mega-influencer, she doesn’t have any real need to engage at length with her followers — she probably doesn’t have the time to do so. She knows that she can charge up to $250,000 per post without day-to-day engagement on her Instagram account.

Foxfell, however, being a mid-tier influencer, must work harder to keep her influencer status. Unsurprisingly, she has made more comments than anybody else on her account. All her other top commenters are smaller than her, although a few are large enough to almost be mid-tier influencers themselves, with most of her top commenters qualifying as micro-influencers. Foxfell clearly knows, and follows, the number one rule of engagement — reply to comments that people leave on your page.

Most Engaged Influencers Statistic

You can see from the next table down that both Kim Kardashian and Foxfell can attract favorite influencers to engage with their account (albeit there is clearly some family involvement in Ms. Kardashian’s case).

Remembering that Foxfell is a more typical influencer, it is notable that popular brands are engaging with and supporting her posts.

Engagement Rates

Towards the top right of each influencer’s page, you will see a series of engagement rates. These show the likes per subscriber, comments per subscriber, and comment per like. The first two figures give you a good indication of how much engagement this Instagram influencer has with his/her subscribers. Comments per Like is less about engagement rate and more about the type of engagement, with the assumption being that it is much harder to encourage somebody to comment on your page that it is for them to just click the Like button. Indeed,

Obviously, the higher the engagement rate, the better for any Instagram (or indeed any other social network) account. However, many studies have shown that sizable Instagram accounts have lower engagement rates than small accounts. This is probably because smaller accounts tend to have keen followers, avidly waiting for posts to share, like and comment on. As accounts grow, more “lurkers” follow these accounts. They may be happy to glance at posts from the Instagrammer but rarely take any action. Another reason for the difference is manageability. It is much easier to notice and reply to comments on your posts if you only have 1,000 followers than if you have one million.

TrackMaven carried out a survey of Fortune 500 companies in 2017, asking how they used Instagram. One notable statistic to emerge from the results was that for every 33 likes you get 1 comment on average. This would indicate that the average Instagrammer’s Comments per Like ratio is 0.03%. This makes Foxfell’s 0.96%, and Kim Kardashian’s 1.10% look excellent in comparison. Ms. Kardashian may not engage all that much (percentage-wise), but she clearly does make thoughtful comments more often than most.

Channel Performance

Of course, with superstar accounts like Kim Kardashian’s, raw numbers can tell you much about the account’s effectiveness.

You can find a Channel Performance box to the left of the Engagement box on the SocialBook profile pages. These give raw numbers relating to likes and comments. It is here that the “celebrity” factor becomes clear. While mega-influencers may only engage with a relatively small proportion of their followers, this is still usually many people.

As we have seen, Foxfell has far better engagement percentages than Kim Kardashian. But when you look at raw numbers, you see that Foxfell has 10.9K likes and 104 comments per post on average. These are very good figures, and any brand would love that engagement on their posts.

Kim Kardashian, however, can claim 816.5K likes and 9.0K comments per post.

This section of SocialBook profiles also shows some stats that are very important for brands considering working with influencers. It separates out figures for sponsored posts from organic posts. Let’s be honest, in most cases, there will be less engagement with sponsored posts than organic posts (just like fewer people click on paid Google ads in the search results than click on organic search results).

While you will notice a difference in the organic versus sponsored likes, it should be less for quality experienced influencers, who have learned how to continue to give value to their followers, even with their sponsored posts.

Foxfell’s stats are probably typical for an experienced influencer: 10.9K organic average like, versus 10.1K sponsored average like.

Kim Kardashian’s statistics make interesting reading here. She has very unusually managed to have a higher sponsored average like (1.0m) over her organic average like figure (814.8k). Of course, you should never forget Kin Kardashian’s asking price, compared to more typical influencers. No matter how good her stats, she is only likely to work with the largest of brands.

Daily Routines You Should Follow to Boot Engagement and Help Your Follower Community

While this section predominantly focuses on Instagram, much of it is relevant to virtually any social network on which you may choose to operate an account and build a follower community.

Most Instagrammers aren’t as successful as Foxfell and probably will never have as many followers as Kim Kardashian. People who make their name offline always have an advantage at building a social following, just because people follow them merely because they recognize their name.

However, most normal Instagrammers can build up their accounts and improve their influencer status and marketability over time. Here are some habits that will help you build momentum with your account.

No matter what your size you need to keep a close eye on your follower community. You always want to encourage both likes and follows, and they are an affirmation from your followers that you are doing things right.

1. Post-High-Quality Content Regularly

Instagram is highly visual. You will only have an engaged follower community if you make interesting, and visually-appealing posts at regular intervals. You can’t get away with just writing a few paragraphs and hope people read them, as you can to an extent on Facebook. You need to spend time taking and making good quality pictures and videos.

It is better to post a couple of times a day every day than it is to post ten posts all at once. Your follower community will notice if you post every day, and this should help you better survive Instagram’s gatekeeper algorithm, ensuring your followers see your posts.

2. Share Instagram Stories with Your Followers

Instagram Stories has proven to be exceptionally popular. You upload a connected sequence of images and video clips which disappear after 24 hours. One of the nicest things about Instagram Stories is that they sit outside the main feed, meaning that they’re less likely to be lost in a long feed. Here is an article showing how story high lights are helping influencers and brands to grow their follower engagement.

3. Keep a Close Eye on Your Follower Statistics

1As we have seen SocialBook shows you much detail about engagement. However, if you want to know about your engagement with your existing followers, it is best to sign up to a business Instagram profile, which gives you access to their Instagram Insights app.

You can combine your data from here with what you learn about your influencers from SocialBook to learn as much as you can about your followers. The more you know about them, the easier it is to adapt your posts to meet their needs better.

4. Engage with Your Followers

This is obvious. If you want people to engage with you, then you must engage with them. Spend time looking at other peoples’ posts, liking and commenting on them. However, don’t just do this randomly. Only make intelligent comments, giving your real views. Don’t like more than 350 posts per hour or you could be in danger of Instagram blocking you.

Take a good look at how your followers interact with your posts. Read their comments and take real notice of what they say. Do they prefer certain types of posts over others? If so, shift your focus to creating more of the kinds of content that engender quality engagement.

5. Target the Types of People You Want to Follow Your Account

If you haven’t already done so, work out who your ideal follower community would be. Once you know your preferred followers, you can produce content targeting that audience, and actively begin searching for that kind of following.

6. Build Long-Term Connections

Some people devote so much energy to searching for new followers that they forget about their existing follower base. You can’t afford to do this — it doesn’t take much for somebody to unfollow you, even if they have followed you for many years.

Ensure you keep on creating relevant posts for your whole follower base, liking and following their posts, tagging them in pictures, and continuing the relationship long-term.

If you follow these daily routines, you should gradually build up your organic follower base. You can then combine this with SocialBook to help target specific new followers that will be of value to your account. Just remember, you don’t become a social media influencer overnight, it takes much time and hard work. And once you reach influencer status, you can’t just sit back. You still must work every day, creating content and engaging with your followers.

This article was originally posted on my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/want-increase-your-follower-engagement-rate-here-how-heidi-yu/