Instagram Growth And Engagement Report For July 2016

Welcome to our monthly Instagram growth and engagement report for July 2016.

Every month we analyse the performance of 2,500 Instagram profiles and give you the main numbers so you can benchmark your own results and see how your performance compares.

Want an easy way to get these numbers (and much more) for your own profiles? Take a free trial of Locowise.

Let’s look at the data for the month of July:

Growth up but engagement down

Instagram profile follower growth was at 0.16% in the month of July. This is a 6.67% increase compared to the record-low growth that we’ve seen in June.

Profiles posted 2.7 times per day on average, a 13.92% increase compared to June. 90.94% of all posts were images.

Engagement per post was at 0.9% of the total followers. This is a 10% decrease compared to June, and it’s the second lowest engagement rate we’ve seen since started doing our studies in April 2015.

The engagement was at 1% on a photo post and 0.8% on a video post. Photos are getting 25% higher engagement than videos. 98.5% of all engagements were “likes”, while 21.94% of all comments were posted on videos.

Let’s not take a look at the latest news, updates and other things you need to know from the world of Instagram.

An effort to boost sharing

Last month we spoke about the problem Instagram has with the decrease of original sharing and engagement. Now we have one new initiative from the company trying to combat the decline: Snapchat Instagram Stories. The pitch is for users to share all moments of their day and not just those best moments.

Kevin Systrom, co-founder and CEO of Instagram, mentioned that “other companies deserve all the credit” for the idea of disappearing content. “Our mission has always been to capture and share the world’s moments, not just the world’s most beautiful moments. Stories will alleviate a ton of the pressure people have to post their absolute best stuff.”

If you’ve ever used Snapchat you know everything you need to know about Instagram Stories. All the moments won’t appear in your profile grid and your feed, but they will appear in a bar on top of the screen, all displayed in a slideshow format and will disappear after 24 hours. There are no likes and no public comments on content posted within Instagram Stories, but you do get to see who and how many people have viewed your story.

Brands have already entered the world of Instagram Stories to take advantage of the freshness of the feature and the large Instagram audience. Nike got 800,000 views in 24 hours for a story on the the first day that the feature was online. Their best Snapchat video ever has got only 66,000 views.

Image: Instagram

Instagram only shows five stories at a time in the horizontal feed. How do they sort all the stories available? There’s a new algorithm. The algorithm looks at whose content the user engages with. It doesn’t only look at engagement on Instagram but it also looks at user’s engagement on Facebook.

Businesses profiles coming to all by end of the year

Businesses profiles are being rolled out to brands in the US, Australia and New Zealand, and the rest of the world will follow by the end of this year. Instagram has released a series of videos for brands to prepare for the business profiles. Here’s the first video in the series:

Removing abuse and spam

There’s now another benefit to having a business page on Instagram: comment moderation. It’s an automated tool and it allows profiles to “block comments with words or phrases often reported as offensive from appearing on posts”.

And more comment moderation features are coming soon to all accounts. Instagram will in the coming weeks and months allow all users to filter their own comment stream and even to completely turn off comments.

Instagram’s head of public policy had this to say: “Our goal is to make Instagram a friendly, fun and, most importantly, safe place for self expression. We have slowly begun to offer accounts with high volume comment threads the option to moderate their comment experience. As we learn, we look forward to improving the comment experience for our broader community.”

The most popular Instagram image is an ad

What’s the most popular Instagram image ever? It’s this Selena Gomez ad for Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke and a Song” campaign with more than five million likes in first five weeks after being published.

Gomez is actually the most influential user in social media with almost 200 million followers combined and is worth $550,000 per post. She’s also the most followed Instagram user.