EP 24 As Engagement Rates Drop, How Can Brands & Creators Stay Calm & Carry On?
Tis the season for engagement rates dropping! Before you hit the panic button, join Harley & Sonia as they discuss the evolution of engagement rates, other metrics that are important, and how to stay calm if your engagement rate takes a dip.
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Timestamps:
[0:47] Why is engagement dropping?
[4:03] Instagram, likes, and stories.
[8:10] Will shifting engagement affect rates?
[12:23] TikTok shows the number of shares a video has.
[16:02] Insta's "see more" button on stories.
[19:10] When does reach actually matter?
[22:53] Takeaways.
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Find Harley:
IG: @theharleyjordan
Website: theharleyjordan.com
Find Sonia:
IG: @Sonia.elyss
Website: soniaelyss.com
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Welcome to brand meet Creator Podcast with me Harley Jordan and Sonia Elise, a place where we pull back
the curtain and the trashy filters on the influencer marketing industry.
So pull up a chair and grab a notebook, it's time to shed some light
on the ever changing, it's diverse.
Welcome back to brand new creator. This episode we're talking about engagement. And the reason this even came up is because engagement we have seen is fluctuating our habits on Instagram are kind of changing. And that brings about some worries for brands booking brand collabs. So let's jump into this conversation about what what we should expect with with engagement rate lowering right now
I know I feel like it is a hot topic that everyone is complaining about. Essentially, it's not even talking about it. It's just like everybody needs to complain about how their engagement is low. And I think it is a big conversation around how we use the app. That's a huge portion of why engagement is dropping. Our I think our attention span is dropping, the amount of apps we're using is dropping the amount of other things we have to do. And also we're just in scroll mode. Now we forget that the point is to engage as
we're also in summer mode. Summer mode. So like we're outside more I mean, if it's nice out, you better believe I'm not scrolling, I can't see my phone in the sun.
phone while I'm outside at the beach, I
can't see it. It's too gray. But engagement rate is causing a lot of worries. And I mean, I hear this all the time is like what what is the brand expect? Is this good? Am I worried? Like what's average? I mean, it's hard to tell it's hard to tell someone what really is average for their account for their size for all of that. But what do you see? What do you see on the brand side? What's your immediate gut response to to engagement?
I think the immediate gut response is that looking at engagement rate is changing dramatically from when we first started on the brand side initially needs to always and maybe just to zoom out for any listeners who are not as familiar with engagement rate. But engagement rate is a percentage that you calculate based off of the number of engagements per post or per reel or per story. That could be
exactly that had links.com Google Google engagement rate calculator it'll it'll spit out a number for Yeah,
exactly. But there's also multiple types of engagement rate right? So when we first started we use always calculate engagement rate based off with the total number of followers because back in the early Instagram glory days, we more much closer to our viewer seeing all of our content every single time at all of it every everybody would see now the glory days. Now the estimate I think is around 20 to 30% of your audience sees your post and that's the higher end. Yeah, so I think a 20% I believe is the average that I always quote of your total followers that see your post. So I have recalculated for my clients specifically and I would encourage others start to do this is that they calculate an engagement rate based off of reach, as opposed to based off of followers. Yes, because why would I count 100,000 people if I know that Instagram at on its very best day is only going to show the content to 30,000 people that doesn't seem fair for me. So I think knowing your average reach is also really important when you're talking about getting into the engagement game.
I really do too. And I think when I am scouting influencers that's my first go to I definitely go to their rails tab I can see all of the metrics there, but the likelihood of me actually thinking twice about your likes. I'm really not because I know there's so much more there there's like save their shares like if you have 300 likes on something do I actually care on honestly I don't and I think that was Instagrams game plan I mean, I don't know if you have been able to see likes in the recent years but I haven't been able to see likes for years on static posts.
Yeah, I can still see them but on some other people's posts I can it's like a hit it's like a depends on the day that I log in.
I know that you can toggle it off so that you can't see the likes but in general my account has been like tested for for this feature of not being able to see likes I remember when this came out because it was I remember the announcement being like coupled with Kim Kardashian for some reason and it being like your your stuff online. aim isn't about vanity and we don't?
That's right. I would say that engagement rate will always be a metric that we use to test the health of an account forever, for sure. But you're right, like if you're an external party, and you are, let's say, casting influencers, before you even reach out to them, the only engagement rate that you can calculate is based off of what you can see, right? So if I can only see likes and comments, but a post is getting a lot of saves or shares or a story gets a ton of replies, and DMS, that is a huge amount of engagement that I think is more quality engagement than seeing just likes and comments that I'm not able to
assess. I think story replies are like an underrated metric. I think story replies are honestly a much better metric than than link clicks. And I, I've seen this from quite a few like service providers where they say, you know, what, I've completely stopped using the link function, because it brings down my story views, which is bizarre, but they're like, I would much prefer to have some kind of odd automation, I use many chats or something like that, where I have them reply the word link, and like, it will automatically send them a message. And I know, this is why your account died at some point. I was gonna
just say, use the auto don't use auto respond. But yeah, I mean, I do think that things that happen in stories are highly underrated, and that you're not counting them enough to the engagement rate. So on the brand side, when looking at this, I would just flag be wary about just, you know, calculating someone's engagement rates based off of the vanity metrics that only you can see without having a conversation with them first, and just like counting them out, because they're only at 1% engagement or less, have someone has a visible strong engagement rate for 5%. Great, that means that what's happening behind the scenes is probably even better. But if someone's on the borderline of what you tend to take into a paid campaign, I wouldn't count them out until you get the rates. And you can request more detailed metrics for Hey,
I just think there's so much more happening there. Because well, we've talked about this, like how much you engage how, how you interact in the app before and if you're older, you're not used to liking everything you like what you like, and if you're a younger generation, you're going to like everything. So I think with Tik Tok, where you aren't liking everything you're watching, maybe you're sending that behavior, I think is shifting really, really quickly, really, really quickly. So Instagram, we're just starting to see less and less reach. And I do think that's going to be normalized after a while. And I do think that reach is going to become a much better metric for what actually matters versus engagement. Do you think that will affect rates at all?
I don't think so. I mean, I think if you're the type of person who can prove that you have an engagement rate on a specific metric that the client is trying to fill that's above and beyond what other people can get or the average gets, then yeah, of course bump up those rates for that specific partnership. But that requires an influencer to know their analytics quite well. Right to Know that like, oh, on stories, when I do this type of shopping feature, I get this many responses. Yeah, I do a q&a. This many people chime in so that if a brand is coming in and say hey, we host a q&a that's geared around our product, yes. Then you can say like I get above average on the store, I'm going to charge more than just saying I'm posting three story slides. Right. So that's really where you're if as an influencer, you need to take control of knowing your body every single area. Yeah,
yeah, I think that's knowing your audience. Like you have to know who your audience is. Have those conversations, like if you're not replying to your DMS and like getting to know your audience who they really are, and learning who they are as a human being asking questions back then, like how do you expect to be able to sell them? You know, I was talking to an influencer friend of mine who has blown up immensely has gained 190k In the last year or so. Samantha Bachman absolutely love her good friend of mine in person. But she recently got the affiliate affiliate linking from Instagram. Have you have you heard of this situation? Basically where you can link products in app Yeah. Hmm. And essentially Yes, essentially, like like to know it but in app and she has been linking products via story. And she's gone from like 1000s of views on her story to 35,000 views on her story. massive reach has been pushed from just using this new feature. And not everyone has it yet. So before before you come at me with mass hysteria, I like have Googled this to the nines and cannot find a single way other than waiting to actually get it. But oh, that's crazy.
I would say for a feature like this, I would not be surprised if it rolls out to everyone, because it's only in Instagrams best interest, or stuff. Because if you don't know how that works is like if I'm a brand, and I open up a shop on Instagram, and I'm selling things through the app, I pay Instagram a percentage for those versions that are in app, right, not a link out to my website where someone converts, but they stay inside the Instagram app and purchase it. So if this girl Samantha is tagging one of my products from a shop, and she says something, not only is Instagram making a commission, they're paying her a commission as well. So why wouldn't they want more of that right to be happening? All the data?
Yep, yep, yep. Yep. She was laughing about it. Because she was like, I've made like $0 off of this and actual commission, but my views are fantastic. I was like, Bring it on.
It's a good start. I mean, yeah, I would I wonder how much they do give the partners in terms of affiliate percentage, if that's competitive, or if they're undercutting because they know, it's like a special feature.
I think it's competitive right now. And I did look this up. And I think there was something about like, if you're doing posts with affiliate tagging, they're doing a kickback to creators to right now. They're really trying to push this but they haven't given it to everyone. I want to say it's like $40 per post up to 10 posts, where you tag something from a shop. So it's a $400 opportunities,
like a flat fee.
Yeah, I don't I mean, I don't know if there's a commission commission opportunity there as well. I assume, with stories, it's a different thing than posts. But regardless, that's a whole whole nother can of worms to get into.
Also, when we're thinking of like tools that Instagram has and tools versus Instagram and Tiktok. What I love one thing about tick tock is when you were looking at someone's post and video, it tells you right away how many saves and shares it has. I don't understand why and this goes on the long list of things. I don't understand why they wouldn't share that information on you know, if we could see likes, and we can see comments. Why can we just see saves and shares? What is the big CIAT?
Yeah, it's weird. It's weird, even the total number of likes that Tik Tok does like even that as like a big bold Capitol number that you have on the front of your feed like that feels like an added extra, that would be really, really easy for Instagram.
Sure, but then they're gonna show the number of views that each reel gets and then they're gonna act like the number of views is somehow always equating to success, when that's not true, either. Like, you can then prop off and it's not
what they're gonna give us real bonuses and tell us that if you hit 84 million views, you get $34,000 Never, never, you're never gonna make that you're never going to even come close,
you are gonna have to just do stupid Instagram hacks for the views just to make the money and then you're gonna be like massively taxed on it won't be worth it.
But then the views don't even count the same after you go up. Like let me get let me just like break down like the fun that this is. So I got real bonuses like pretty early, it gave me the 34k potential in like earnings per month. At the very beginning, and a lot of my friends were getting like on a lot of my clients were getting like $800 per month that you have the potential of like lower numbers, that kind of thing. And they were making the full $800 with far less views than I was. And I think now what we're seeing is more people roll out with that high high potential, but we're all only making no matter how many followers you have, no matter how many views that you actually bring in, like 150 bucks, which is just it feels like that's such a cop out for Instagram. Sure. Like why are you giving me this high potential?
Exactly why even do it or just like make it a much lesser cost? And I don't I still don't even understand like, why he pay people because everyone's using them anyway. So it's not like really you need to incentivize people to use Rails like everyone's on board. They're doing it but I'm doing it now. Okay,
so here's here's my theory. In the very beginning, I thought that they did that, because engagement was dropping, because habits were dropping, engagement was dropping. And in the back of my head, I'm like, okay, they're giving us this boost, because partnership rates with lower engagement per follower count are gonna have to go down. If your rates go down, they're giving us this boost to make it better. And they keep saying, creators come first creators come first, like creators are our first priority. And like, then you're doing this?
I don't think so I think the truth is, advertisers are always the first priority. And that's not just Instagram data that's everywhere, everywhere. Yeah. Yeah, advertisers are the first priority. And I think it's actually that in adding reels, they added another place where they could put ads, which created more money for them. So the more people that they had using reels, the more they could integrate ads into reels and the more money that they could make. So that would be my assumption.
True. Okay. So let's, let's talk about a place where reach is about to go down immensely for another reason. And I don't know if you've heard about this feature yet, because this was something that was brought to my attention literally yesterday, but it is this See More button that they've put in that dang left hand corner on your stories. So you can only see three slides, it'll tell you at the top three out of 15. And to see past that third slide, you have to click see more. So that button again, top left hand corner, I am not going to reach it with my little thumb just like that, like follower, following feed, whatever that feed option is chronological feed. So we're not going to use that. So anyone that selling via stories is going to struggle. Anyone that's chatty via stories is going to struggle. And we're either going to need to teach our audience to click that See More button, which I don't know if we will be able to or story these are about to go down immensely.
That makes me so sad. I mean, I'm sure they have a reason like, Oh, we're trying to drive people back into the feed consumed back in the feed. I think they are Lucy that usage that usage time on stories is much higher than in feed, which is not what they want.
Yeah, we both hang out in stories. We
save things. And it's it's such a great place for engagement.
Yeah, I think they're just trying to get more casual content on the feed. I think they're trying to make it chill on the feed again, so that you drive traction down there.
No, I really, I really hope this isn't gonna be something that gets taken over for everyone. I didn't see it as an announcement. But I've also been a little checked out of the Instagram this week. So I did notice an interesting thing on reels though. And maybe this is like just me being slow to the times. But I thought it was interesting that I saw that there was a templates feature now, did you? Yes,
I did. And I think it's mildly embarrassing, because you can I think it's mildly embarrassing. Because I'm posting speaking reels. And I'm cutting I'm chopping up. I'm chopping up my sentences into literal two second chunks, so that I can keep my audience's attention. And so that I can cut out all the frickin dead space that I possibly can. So when you go to my template, it's this 32nd Real is 15 two second chunks of me like speaking. And so I mean
it was an actual it was like a special thing. It's for
like travel girl. montages. Aesthetic montage, which is great, which might also be the death of tutorials for that, thank God I'm not transmitting girl anymore.
Good scene, nice shot of that.
So okay, if stories are about to go down, reach is about to go down in general, like when when is high reach a vanity metric versus when does it matter?
Hmm. Okay, I have a good example for this. I recently casted a girl who the scope of work was to ask her to do a 15 to 32nd video a real that was specific to the product. She ended up delivering something that I think was eight seconds. And it's okay, but honestly, the product is not as highlighted as I would like. I mean, in eight seconds, how much can you really do? And the client was like, you know, I thought we said 15 seconds was the minimum. So we told her listen, we did say 15 seconds was the minimum from the beginning.
On Track. Yeah,
yeah. Her rationale was that you know, she gets more Use if it's a shorter video because it can loop faster. And we talked about this in our hacks. And so I had explained to her listen, I appreciate that you're trying to be strategic with the views. But at the end of the day, double. I did double the views on your video, but no one knows that you're selling this specific product on there long enough, they don't get to read about it or they don't really want to see the detail of it, then I don't care about double the views. I care about half the views with a video that's more focused on the product that I'm trying to sell. So that is one of those times where reach doesn't matter to me. It's the quality of the actual video matters more.
I agree. And I think there are ways where you can have both really salesy content and really high reach at the same time. My girl, Samantha, I keep bringing her up, I bring her up in all of my courses, I swear because I just think she's so good at this, literally go follow Samantha because she is an amazing example. She makes these big, beautiful charcuterie boards. But she can create these reels with really authentic incorporation of these products of these cheeses of these, like whatever kind of grocery brands and have it be the main character of the show, but also teaching something so that it's saved and shared over and over and over. But is that the norm is salesy content. Normally, the thing that like makes moves in the awareness category and pushes to the most people know, it's not like if you're selling something people skip commercials, but it also that heavy heavy sales pushes where people press buy. So it's so tough with influencer marketing in the goal of the actual brand. Yeah, for
sure. I mean, I think that to me, this program, or this partnership that we're doing, specifically, a, we know that no one's going to click buy off of a reel, right, that's, that's not an option. There's no lakes, but they are going to hopefully click buy off of the stories that are shared that support that real right. So to me, the real is really about the artistry, and the craftsmanship and the styling of the product, and really highlighting, you know, their main things which was like comfort and, you know, great quality, etc, etc. And then in the stories is where I want to see the selling like the the influence, or chide, hey, I wore this and it was amazing. And it was so comfortable and look at all the stuff that matches with and here's my discount code and like click to go buy yours, right? Yeah, that's like the enhancement for me that sells it. The real is more like the mystique. It's the beginning portion that like draws me in to learn more about what this thing is. Yeah. All right. So what our main takeaway is going to be here, because I think we've covered a lot of ground when it comes to engagement, both about how people are using the app, right? What is happening with engagement? And why because of how the app is developing. What do you want influencers to know Harley? What
do you know what I want brands to know this here? I want brands to know what I've got to say, this is a big bold capital message. Low engagement does not mean purchased followers. I think if you're looking at looking at creators and cringing, or you know giving them side eye when you can't even create that replicate that engagement on your feed. Why are you judging like that's a really fine line in like, you don't have room to step in and judge so creators, I don't think that worrying about this engagement is necessarily I don't think it's worth your time. I don't think it's worth your time, low engagement comes and goes. And when you hit those peaks, that's amazing. And you're psyched on it. But if you're getting if you're getting torn up about those lows, then I think you need to like it's time to step back.
Yeah, Don't torture yourself on the platform at the end of the day. And I think my take grand takeaways here also sort of marry yours. It's for brands and influencers. Engagement is just one small piece of the pie a few years ago, engagement, I think was a much larger piece of the pie in terms of access on success on this app. Now, it's just one small thing. So if you see someone with lower engagement, or you even see someone with higher engagement, it's just one small portion of how to wait, the success that they're going to have in your campaign or the success later on down the road. So take it with a grain of salt, everyone don't get your panties in a bunch when it comes to engagement, as you can see, and even a bunch, the app is just going to keep changing, everything's gonna keep evolving, which means that your engagement rate will continue to evolve. And the way that we use the platforms are going to continue to evolve. So just keep moving and grooving out there. Okay, lemonade ruin and we hope that you do come engage with us. Come find us on Instagram, and we hope to see and hear from you very soon.
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