Three months ago, Aman started her Instagram journey with a casual portrait picture and a single-line caption announcing her arrival on the platform. Every subsequent post from her has turned into a digital event that gets discussed across the internet. The veteran actor shares anecdotes from her career in cinema, gives a glimpse into her present life, talks about the people and issues that matter to her, sportingly shares memes featuring her and gives an insight into how and why she landed on the ‘gram – courtesy of a little nudge and tech support from her sons. In one of her posts, she even takes a friendly dig at most Instagram profiles, likening them to “advertising billboards”, all the while highlighting that she would like hers to retain the blogging essence and do very few, “clearly labelled” sponsored posts.
Aman has only a quarter of a million followers so far, but her Instagram account’s engagement rate is 16.61%, as per data gathered by Qoruz, a creator tech company.
The figure is three-four times higher than what many popular celebrities on the platform command, including global pop culture icons like Taylor Swift and Jennifer Aniston, as well as popular Indian actors across age groups, like Alia Bhatt, Ranveer Singh, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Madhuri Dixit Nene and Jackie Shroff, to name a few. In absolute numbers, most of these celebrities’ content draws more eyeballs than Aman’s because of their significantly higher follower count at the moment.
For context, engagement rate measures what percentage of your audience engages with your content. To arrive at the percentage, you divide the total number of likes and comments on all posts by the total number of followers someone has, and then multiply the result by 100. Typically, analytics firms refine this formula for better results. Qoruz omits anomalies like unusually viral posts while calculating engagement rate to give a more accurate average figure. “Zeenat Aman’s current engagement rate is phenomenal,” says Aditya Gurwara, cofounder of Qoruz. “Most big accounts (with a few million followers) tend to have 1-5% engagement rate,” he adds. “When her account reaches the million mark, if it is able to retain even half of this engagement rate, the absolute numbers will be impressive.”
Celebrity accounts can have an unusually high engagement rate at the beginning but it tends to normalise over time, notes Gurwara. “It happened in the case of both Jennifer Aniston and Kareena Kapoor Khan. Even their Instagram arrival was the talk of the town back then,” he adds. The surprisingly high engagement rate of Aman’s account is noteworthy as it does not follow any of the norms that supposedly get the platform’s algorithm to push content to more people’s feeds.
For instance, most Instagrammers, or IGers, post static images in a reel format for better traction and add a song in the background at minimum volume to ride the trending audio wave.
