The fierce competition and algorithms of Facebook and Instagram are making it increasingly difficult to ensure reach and interaction with editorial posts – i.e. without an advertising budget. So what are good values in terms of “organic reach” and “engagement” in 2020? An analysis.
Let’s start with the positives: In purely statistical terms , the reach on Instagram and Facebook is still ok. According to Fanpage Karma, very small Instagram accounts (0 to 500 followers) reach an average of 62% of their subscribers with their posts, medium-sized accounts (10,000 to 20,000 followers) reach 23% and very large accounts (over 5 million followers) still reach 11%. According to the Digital 2020 study, the organic reach on Facebook in Germany should average 6.9 percent of fans reached per post (Slide 118). That sounds reasonable, as you have to assume that not everyone sees everything, even with other media – for example, not all subscribers to a print newspaper read all the articles it contains. In addition, even small companies and organizations can quickly reach several thousand fans and followers on social media. So is everything tutti? Not at all.
The range is almost insignificant
In my opinion, the reach statistics are meaningless moon figures that are mainly used to impress unsuspecting bosses. For example, a post reach of 10,000 in no way means that the post was seen by 10,000 people. In my opinion, you should think of the reach figures more like passers-by walking past advertising posters. With luck, someone will look at it, and with even more luck, someone will still know what was on the poster two minutes later. The sheer number of passers-by walking past the poster, on the other hand, is irrelevant. So if you seriously want to know how many people have seen a post, it is better to look at the interactions.
A small consolation for fans of reach: reach and interaction correlate. Reach is useful for measuring relative success, for example if you want to analyze the development of posts over several months. Because the more interaction, the higher the reach – and vice versa.
Is interaction higher on Facebook than on Instagram?
Interaction on Facebook is defined as clicks/taps, likes,
shares and comments. In recent years, this rate (also known as
“engagement”) has plummeted. According to a study by Buffer
, the interaction rate
fell by 50 percent between the beginning of 2017 and mid-2018 alone, while the engagement rate per post fell by as much as 65 percent.
In a study published at the end of 2019, Iconosquare
arrived at an interaction rate per post
of 3.2 percent. A slightly higher figure is given in the
Report Digital
2020 published at the end of January 2020: According to this report, the engagement rate on Facebook in Germany is 4.0 percent per post (Slide 120).
The smaller an account, the higher the interaction rate. For example,
pages with fewer than 10,000 fans achieve an impressive 8.2 percent, while pages with more than
100,000 fans only achieve 2.2 percent (Slide 121). According to the same study, the
Engagement rate on Instagram at just 1.5
percent (Slide 131). Likes, saves and comments were counted as
interactions.
Problematic comparison of the interaction rate on Facebook and Instagram
I have to admit that these figures left me in disbelief, because in my experience, interaction on Instagram is significantly higher than on Facebook. One distortion here is mainly due to the “clicks/taps” – a statistic that only exists on Facebook and makes a big difference. For example, the “post click rate” for a Facebook page I manage is 1.3% per post, while the “reactions, comments and shared content” (similar to those calculated for Instagram in the study) is a depressing 0.2% – a far cry from the 4.0% mentioned. On the other hand, I achieved an interaction rate of 1.9% for the associated Instagram channel, which is above the average. As I have often heard from other social media managers that Instagram performs significantly better than Facebook, I took a small sample.
Facebook sample: How many likes per post are good?
I looked at the last ten posts from ten different sized Facebook pages from various industries that were online for at least 24 hours and divided the number of likes/reactions per post by the number of subscribers. This resulted in the following like rates:
- Schauspiel Dortmund (6,300 subscribers): 0.43 %
- From Jungfeld (16,000 subscribers): 0.05 %
- Publishing group Droemer Knaur (23,600 subscribers): 0.69 %
- Ruhr University Bochum (55,200 subscribers): 0.30%
- Hans im Glück – Burgergrill (138,900 subscribers): 0.05 %
- Bohemian BrowserBallet (246,700 subscribers): 0.76 %
- True Fruits Smoothies (559,000 subscribers): 0.10 %
- Rewe (1,093,100 subscribers): 0.08 %
- Tagesschau (1,764,900 subscribers): 0.07 %
- FC Bayern Munich (49,861,200 subscribers): 0.02 %
In order to compare these like rates with the engagement rate from the study, the post clicks, which significantly distort the interaction rates (upwards), as well as the interactions from the comments and shares are missing. On balance, however, these Like rates seem to me to provide a more realistic picture of the status quo on Facebook. As a practicing social media manager, the fact that even the top performer in the sample is far removed from the average engagement rate of the Digital 2020 report reassures me a little. Because in my opinion, you can hardly run a Facebook page better than the Bohemian Browser Ballet.
Instagram sample: How many likes per post are good?
Similar to the Facebook pages, I also analyzed the last ten posts of the respective channels on Instagram and divided the number of likes per post by the number of subscribers. Here is the result:
- Schauspiel Dortmund (2,700 subscribers): 2,67 %
- From Jungfeld (12,200 subscribers): 0.34 %
- Publishing group Droemer Knaur (16,700 subscribers): 2,96 %
- Ruhr-Universität Bochum (20,300 subscribers): 6,54 %
- Hans im Glück – Burgergrill (23,800 subscribers): 2,86 %
- Bohemian Browser Ballet (45,800 subscribers): 15,01 %
- True Fruits Smoothies (140,200 subscribers): 1,84 %
- Rewe (183,800 subscribers): 0.84 %
- Tagesschau (1,355,800 subscribers): 2,30 %
- FCBayern München (20,084,900 subscribers): 1,34 %
It is easy to see that the like rates on Instagram are significantly higher than on Facebook. The average of 1.5 percent for the interaction rate stated in the Digital 2020 report is a comparatively low benchmark. As a motivated social media manager, you don’t have to aim for the 15 percent of the Bohemian Browser Ballet, but two or three percent is certainly not wrong.
Conclusion: Like rates on Instagram are significantly higher
Although all companies and organizations in the sample had significantly fewer subscribers on Instagram than on Facebook (between 23 and 83 percent fewer!), they all had significantly more likes on Instagram (twice to 30 times as many!). So while a like rate per post of one percent is high on Facebook, it is low on Instagram. Of course, a lot depends on the industry, the size of the account and the post frequency , but as a social media manager on Instagram you should at least aim for an interaction rate of two percent. On Facebook, you can also aim for the two percent mark, but then you also have to count the post clicks as interaction. Otherwise you will get depressed 😉
