The 2022 Instagram Engagement Report, produced by Hubspot and social listening and media monitoring platform, Mention, has found that, among the 1.3 billion active users on Instagram, the UK came in third place as the country with the most posts published in 2021.
Engagement in the UK and Ireland surpassed last year’s global average, coming in at 5.43%, nearly double the global average of 2020 at 2.26%. The report findings this year saw that cities with smaller populations ranked higher for engagement, versus a bigger metropolis which was seen in our 2021 report.
It appears that Instagram users in the UK and globally prefer more local content and profiles as we move into 2022, which could be related to lockdown orders in many areas around the world. There has been a shift in consumption of Instagram content, where municipalities like Shadwell are climbing the ranks for the most engaged geo-tagged location in the UK. When it comes to content type, UK and Irish users are engaging the most with content that uses hashtags related to lockdown and small businesses throughout the year.
Francesca Chong, head of content, Mention, said: 4“When diving into the Instagram Engagement data, it’s clear that Brits are rediscovering our local treasures and home comforts. This has definitely been influenced by international travel becoming so complicated with the latest Covid restrictions.”
Trust in the news has dipped across generations in the UK Edelman, 2022), despite lowered national sentiments towards media and news, the Instagram Engagement Report found this category to be the most popular to follow. Thus, making a significant impact on the way the UK and Irish population has consumed news over the past year.
The UK and Ireland’s top 50 profiles were a combination of brands, comedy pages, sports personalities, and media outlets. Among the top 10 accounts, the BBC ranked as the second most popular Instagram account for British and Irish users, receiving the highest number of followers; with The Economist (4th), BBC Radio (10th), and Bazaar UK (11th) close behind. The average number of followers by business category was led by Publishers, like BBC News for example. Publishers ranked 3 times higher than the second and third place categories, Transportation and Accommodation (2nd) and Celebrities (3rd).
Global Highlights:
- The global average engagement rate in 2021 was 5.86%, which is more than double from 2022 at 2.26%The most-followed accounts, globally, are becoming more diverse, with India, Brazil, and Korea especially well-represented
- Video is the most engaging type of content, bringing in an average of 24.25 comments and 1097.9 likes per post
- The global top 50 is made up of 41 celebrities and only 9 brands, including Instagram itself
- The top eight brands focused on sports, travel, space and nature
- Top accounts are bigger than ever — over half have 100M+ followers
More than 109,534,641Instagram posts and 10,359,460of users were analysed to observe trends about engagement rates, hashtags and other insights that matter to both brands and marketers.
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