Engagement on Instagram accounts of influencers has dropped to almost the lowest level in the history of the social network. This is reported in a joint study by InfluencerDB and Mobile Marketer.

Over the past three years, the engagement of advertising posts on the accounts of opinion leaders has fallen from 4% to 2.4%, and non-advertising posts from 4.5% to 1.9% (according to the first quarter of 2019). According to analysts, the reason for the decline in audience interest in blogs was too much advertising on the pages.

Currently, the engagement of large influencers with accounts of 10 thousand subscribers or more is on average 3.6%. For accounts from 5 thousand to 10 thousand, this figure is 6.3%, and from 1 thousand to 5 thousand - 8.8%.

Over the past year, engagement on Instagram has fallen across all categories. For example, engagement with travel bloggers' accounts, the most popular category, fell from 8% to 4.5%. A similar situation is observed in beauty, fashion, food, sports and fitness, as well as lifestyle blogs.

InfluncerDB believes that the study revealed two Instagram trends - one positive and one negative.

On the positive side, the engagement of sponsored posts on the social network is higher than usual. This may be due to the fact that bloggers spend more time and effort on preparing such publications, or because Instagram's algorithms give advertising materials priority in the feed.

A negative trend is the overall decline in engagement due to the "clogging" of the feed with advertising posts. It is more profitable for brands to work with "nano-influencers" - opinion leaders with a smaller reach. That's why, on average, a brand works with 726 opinion leaders in one advertising campaign.

The engagement rate in InfluencerDB refers to the ratio of likes to followers.

Engagement is falling not only in influencers' accounts, but also in social networks as a whole. This follows from a recently published study by Trust Insights.