Despite increased use, the pandemic didn’t boost Instagram engagement

Despite more people being stuck at home over the past year due to the pandemic, overall Instagram engagement rates dropped from the year prior, according to a report from social listening and media monitoring platform Mention in collaboration with growth platform Hubspot. 

Average engagement on any kind of post dropped from 2.26% in the 2020 findings to 1.42%, found Mention in its fourth-annual Instagram Engagement Report with Hubspot, sourced from data from 100 million public posts by 1 million users.

Carousel posts saw the greatest engagement, beating out single-image and video posts. The report found that carousel posts received on average 62 likes and 5 comments. It also found that longer captions tend to perform better: those in the 1,000-to-2,000-character range saw the most engagement.

Women make up a greater portion of the most influential users on the platform. From the top 50 profile list, the most influential users are 40% male and 60% female. This corresponds with the most-engaged types of accounts, which are related to the beauty and cosmetics industry. 

The report also looked at which geotagged locations saw the greatest engagement, with Beverly Hills, California in the No. 1 spot among the top 50 cities worldwide.