If you have collaborated with influencers you probably want to know if your campaigns have been more or less successful than your competitor’s campaigns… Does the campaign’s engagement rate on Instagram and Youtube is better than the average engagement rate of your brand category? Does the influencer you have chosen is engaging more than the others with the same criteria (age, gender, …)?

Good news! Influence4Brands (the European leader of Influence Marketing platforms) is sharing with you a full study about social media engagement (dated 2nd April 2018). In addition, at the end of this article, you will be able to access to a special tool which allows you to get more updates and details (pivot tables,…) of the influencers engagement for free!

Have fun and tell people around you that you are now an expert in sponsored post’s engagement.

Definitions :
Engagement on Instagram : (Nb likes+nb comments) / nb of followers
Engagement on Youtube : (Nb likes+nb comments) / nb views on the video
Sponsored post : here we consider that the post is sponsored if the influencer has been paid or received a free product for the post. 

What did we learn about Instagram and Youtube engagement thanks to this study?

#1 the average engagement rate of the sponsored posts

As of the date of this study,  there are 3.48% on Instagram ((likes + comments) / nb of followers) and 4.74% on Youtube ((likes + comments) / views). Those numbers are very wide averages and some posts or videos have an engagement rate above 15%. We will see below the standard deviations and levers (regardless of the content of the post itself) that contribute to the differences in engagement rates.

#2 the engagement rate based on influencer’s reach

On Instagram, micro influencers engage more than big influencers.

*Total général = Total

This trend is confirmed by the study of tanke.fr (which was about all types of Instagram posts – whether sponsored or not).

Now we have to keep in mind the strong volatility of Instagram posts as you can see below.

Now you understand the importance of choosing the right influencer and even more the importance of the brief given to the influencer to maximize the engagement. Keep in mind that an influencer with a large audience still may have a great engagement! 

Same observation on Youtube : micro influencers engage more than big influencers.

Again the standard deviation is large.

NB: here the engagement is based on the number of views of the video (and not the number of subscribers which would have make less sense). The regression curve is an exponential curve. Now if you are curious, you will find info on the YouTube engagement rate depending on the audience size of the influencers (but not the number of views) in our free tool at the end of the article. You will see the figure is very different.

Why is this happening? Some people say that micro influencers are more “authentic”… maybe. We think that it is more related to the “erosion”: most of the time a big influencer has subscribers who have subscribed long time ago and therefore the relationship with the community may have declined with these old subscribers, and they might not be very active on Instagram as well… On the other hand, a smaller influencer will tend to respond to all the comments and therefore have a closer relationship with his community. So we don’t think that the big influencers are less authentic, but their engagement is perhaps lower because of the size of their audience and therefore the difficulty of managing a larger community.

#3 the engagement rate based on influencer’s age

On Instagram, the young influencers engage more.

*Autre = Others / Total général = Total

… and the 25-34 years old instagrammers much less…

On Youtube also the young influencers engage more.

(Let’s say that the first line is not very representative of the statistics. Look at the advanced tool at the end of the article to get more stats about the 45-54 years old influencers.)

#4 the engagement rate based on the brand’s category

On Instagram, the Fashion category engages almost 2 times more than Beauty!

This is probably because Fashion involves showing the bodies and faces more than Beauty, which implies to highlight the product itself. Regarding Gaming, the engagement rate seems very strong too (probably caused by the great interest for licensed games), but the sample here is a bit too small to be our final theory.

Actually, the brand category seems to be less impacting the Youtube engagement rate.

… maybe because Youtubers show their face both in the Fashion and the Beauty category. Regarding High-Tech and Gaming (where most of the videos don’t show the face of the influencer), the engagement rates are a little bit lower.

In conclusion: to increase the engagement rate of your sponsored posts ask the influencers to show their pretty little face 😉

#5 the engagement rate of the sponsored posts
based on the period

On Instagram the engagement rate tends to grow.

This might be related to the quality of the briefs and a good selection of the influencers by the brands (at least on Influence4Brands… thanks to our algorithms!)

And it is even better on Youtube : the engagement rate increases too!

According to our thousands of campaign operations experience, without campaign optimisation, the engagement rate is very hard to be well enhanced. Thus, the significance of selecting a great influencer profile and creating attractive contents can never be over-emphasized. But how to start your first important step of making a right choice? What if you can have a closer insight of each influencer’s engagement rate in their social networks? Influence4brands powers you when you need to make this decision.

How to create a campaign and choose the right influencers?

Watch the following tutorial video about Influence4Brands :

Do you want to go further?

Want to get more information and updated numbers and data ? For example : which gender of influencer is more engaging?  Click on the link below :