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What Is a Good Engagement Rate for Micro-Influencers?
Influencer Marketing
A cornerstone of social media marketing is the ability to track, monitor, and analyze key metrics in real time. For example, reach describes the number of people who see your content and impressions indicate the number of times people saw your content.
But on social media, it doesn’t just matter how many accounts saw your content or the number of times they did. It also matters how many times people interacted with it. Marketers refer to this magical metric as engagement rate.
In the world of influencer marketing, engagement rate stands out as one of the crucial metrics to track. Influencers with the highest engagement rates are those with the most tuned-in audiences, and thus, they allow brands access to some of the most easily convertible potential customers – if they play their cards right.
Read on to learn more about engagement rate and how it differs across influencer tiers, as well as how micro-influencers have become a major player in the engagement rate games.
What Are The Different Types Of Influencers?
Working with influencers has become a popular and powerful tool for brands to use to get their offerings in front of new audiences. Influencer marketing in 2022 has especially seen the rise of working with micro-influencers, who generally have a follower count of around 10,000–100,000 people.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the influencer tiers, from nano-influencers to what this graph calls mega macro-influencers.
Pictured: Influencer Audience Reach vs. Engagement Rate (Later)
The different tiers of influencers all have benefits and drawbacks. As the chart above explains, as an influencer’s following goes up, their reach does, too. However, their engagement actually decreases. Let’s dive further into engagement rate to explain why.
What Is Engagement Rate?
To understand how your social media marketing campaign is performing, you’ll need to gain some knowledge of basic KPIs (key performance indicators), such as following, reach, and engagement rate.
Engagement rate measures the number of engagements (e.g., number of likes, comments, and shares) a piece of content gets as a percentage of the overall audience. It’s often used as a selling point in influencers’ media kits, as well as a way to calculate a campaign’s overall return on investment (ROI). It is calculated as total engagements over total followers, multiplied by 100.
Pictured: Average Engagement Rate Calculation (Hootsuite)
Different campaigns have different goals, and therefore, different metrics to prioritize. For example, if your team wanted to run a brand awareness campaign to simply increase the recognition of your brand in certain audiences, impressions or reach would be paramount to track. Brands with a large budget who want to get in front of millions of eyes should consider working with a macro-influencer or mega macro (celebrity) influencer to attain this level of reach.
Alternatively, for many influencer campaigns (especially those conducted by smaller brands with less budget), it’s all about conversions. For these, getting in front of highly-engaged audiences that are more likely to like, comment, and share posts is invaluable because, at the end of the day, they are more likely to click ‘purchase.’ Brands that are aware of their target audience’s online interests and are ready to make more sales should consider working with nano- or micro-influencers to attain this level of engagement.
What Is The Average Engagement Rate On Social Media In 2023?
According to Phlanx, which offers an Instagram Engagement Calculator, the following represents the average engagement rate on Instagram:
Pictured: Average Engagement Rate on Instagram based on Number of Followers (Phlanx)
As previously stated, the higher one’s following, the lower their engagement rate. Now that we understand how to calculate engagement rate, this makes sense. For one thing, engagement rate is literally divided by one’s total following, making it harder to keep this metric high as the denominator (following) increases while the numerator (engagements) may not. Following someone is a much more passive marker of fandom than consistently interacting with their content.
Another reason this makes sense is that smaller influencers like micro-influencers have a higher level of perceived genuineness. Since they often make their start among friends or fellow enthusiasts for whatever niche they’re a part of, their engagement rate stays high, due to the high level of response they get on their posts compared to their low(er) level of followers..
What Is Considered A Good Engagement Rate?
It’s important to understand what a “good” engagement rate is in 2022.
The numbers are always changing, from how many influencers are on a platform to which platforms are the kings of their day. However, most marketers agree that anywhere between 1% and 5% denotes a fair engagement rate. While this may seem low, it is incredibly difficult to attain higher than a 10% engagement rate on most major platforms.
For micro-influencers, a “good” engagement rate means anywhere above 2.5% to 3.5%, as that is above average in their influencer tier and much higher than the rate of macro-influencers and above.
How Lionize Can Help
Wish you were working with the right influencers to build your brand and make more sales?
Boost your engagement rate today by getting started with Lionize. Our AI software simplifies the influencer marketing process by finding the right influencers for your brand and streamlining the process of working with them. Book a Discovery Call today to set up a free demo.
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