Engagement rate : How important is it in 2022?

When you want to collaborate with influencers, you cannot pick them solely based on their number of followers or because you like their content. There are many criteria to check out before contacting influencers to make sure your collabs are efficient and so that you don’t waste your money. Getting access to the engagement rate, or audience quality of an influencer is great but you should also know how to analyze these figures. Here are all the essential criteria you should take into account for an influencer campaign.

What is the engagement rate? And why is it important?

At the beginning of Influence Marketing, it was hard for brands to determine which influencers were right for their campaigns. They typically collaborated with the biggest influencers. Therefore the main criterion for brands was the number of followers. Over the years, things have evolved, and brands started to realize that the number of followers couldn’t be the only thing they should take into consideration. First of all, because this number can be inaccurate since it is really easy to buy fake followers, and secondly because a high number of followers doesn’t insure that a collaboration will be a success.

Moreover, nano and micro-influencers are more and more present these last few years, therefore using the number of followers would be useless.

This is why brands now use different metrics to evaluate influencers.

There are different metrics that can be interesting to look at, but brands usually focus on the engagement rate.

The engagement rate is the ratio between the number of interactions (likes, comments, etc) and the reach. There are different ways to calculate an engagement rate, but to spare you sometimes you can find the engagement rate of any influencer on Favikon.

But once you have the engagement rate of an influencer you need to determine if it is a good one or not. You should keep in mind that a good engagement rate on Instagram doesn’t equal a good engagement rate on TikTok. The algorithms and the type of content are different so you can’t compare them.

On Favikon, you can easily know if an influencer has a great engagement rate. The figure is either in green, orange, or red.

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But why is engagement rate important?

It is a key metric because it determines if the community of an influencer interacts a lot with their content. Most of the time, a high engagement rate means that the influencer’s followers like their content and that the influencer is close to their community.

And as a brand, working with a creator who has an excellent engagement ensures that your collaboration will be successful and that you will have a high conversation, as their followers are more likely to follow their recommendations.

So if your goal is to increase your sales, you have to check your influencers’ engagement rate.

Is the engagement rate still relevant?

Trends always move extremely fast on social media, and what was true yesterday, might not be true tomorrow. So will the engagement rate still be relevant in 2022?

There are other metrics to look out for your influencer campaign

As of right now, it is most likely that the engagement rate will still be used by many brands. However, there are other metrics and criteria that you should check before contacting influencers and launching your campaign.

Saturation rate is also an interesting metric. This rate shows the amount of sponsored content compared to the amount of organic content. Keep in mind that collaborating with an influencer who does a lot of sponsored posts won’t be as profitable for your business. Their community won’t see their sponsored content as sincere and they won’t follow their recommendations.

You should also look at their audience quality. This shows you if their audience is real and if they didn’t buy fake followers.

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The last important thing is of course to make sure that the influencers that you choose match your brand’s values and image. This will make your collabs appear more genuine and they will be more successful.

Video content to increase engagement rate in 2022

Since 2020/2021, there has been a rise in video content especially with the rise of TikTok and the Reels on Instagram. There is no doubt that videos will also play a major role in 2022. You might want to incorporate this type of content into your influencer’s brief. TikTok has a very specific algorithm that allows you to easily go viral. Instagram is also boosting Reels more and more. Because videos are more likely to go viral, the engagement rate of these types of content is usually higher. This is why you should consider it for your strategy.

The engagement rate will still be very important in 2022, but the essential part is to be able to analyze these figures. When analyzing an engagement rate or any other metrics, you should always take into account the type of content, type of influencers, and type of platform. The metrics to check before a campaign also depends on your objectives.