A couple weeks ago Instagram announced they’d be adding view counts to videos. Sure enough, last week I started to see the first such counts show up.

But as I scrolled through the first view counts that began to appear in my feed, I started to notice something that I had never seen before with social media stats: consistency. View counts within the same account were extremely similar to one another.

Why is that so surprising? Let me explain.

Likes
Take Mammoth for example. On their last five Facebook posts, their most and least liked videos on Facebook in the last couple days were:

• LEAST – Likes: 15 – Like Rate: 0.006%
• MOST – Likes: 105 – Like Rate: 0.036%

Driven by a combination of by content quality and an algorithm (that exaggerates differences in quality), the difference between the two extremes is a massive 600%.

On Instagram there is no algorithm, which means that quality alone will be the driver of engagement. In this case, the gap gets closer. Of their last five Instagram videos, the most liked and least like posts were (like rate = likes/followers):

• LEAST – Likes: 2,899 – Like Rate: 1.23%
• MOST – Likes: 5,693 – Like Rate: 2.41%

A difference of 96%.

But views can be triggered regardless of content quality, which is why we see the smallest gap of all (view rate = views/followers):

• LEAST – Views: 22,762 – View Rate: 9.65%
• MOST – Views: 27,074 – View Rate: 12.99%

A difference of only 30%.

When you have a metric that exists almost independent of content quality and can be triggered by visibility alone you have a pretty good indication of post reach.

What I’m Seeing
The views metric is not yet available via the API, so all the analyses I’ve done so far have been manual, but here are the average view rates that I’ve seen for a few groups.

• 0-5000 followers – avg view rate: 31.2%
• 5,000-10,000 followers – avg view rate: 24.7%
• 10,000+ followers – avg view rate: 15.5%

The only number I’ve seen for average reach is 25-35%, which supports what we see here. Suggesting that looking at view rate may be the closest thing we’ll have to reach until Instagram makes that publicly available.

And, so being, you can divide engagement by video view counts and get the closest thing to a true engagement rate (how many people engaged / how many people saw it and could have engaged) we’ve ever had on Instagram.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.