A brief discussion around engagement rates, mostly concerning Instagram, but could be helpful with understanding how algorithms and the system works elsewhere as well.

The engagement rate that makes a difference is the amount of comments you get per unit time for example. I don’t think they determine the engagement rate relative to the number of followers. They don’t consider your engagement to be any less because relative to your number of followers, the number is still small. Two percent of one million followers is less than four percent of a hundred thousand. Even if the amount of engagement that the post got in case of the two percent engagement rate is much more than in that of the four percent post.

This is not what engagement rate means or how they measure how good a post is performing or getting engagement based upon.

I understand that you can call the amount of engagement you’re getting compared to the number of followers you have engagement rate. That is fact and there’s nothing wrong with that.

However, there’s no evidence that they decrease your reach or how much they push out your posts to your followers or to new people based upon that kind of engagement rate mentioned above. To think they do means that anyone who has millions of followers will be shadow banned indefinitely due to no fault of their own. They will be punishing people for having a huge following that is out of proportion to the and does not match the expected amount of authentic engagement they’re really getting per every post, which is clearly not the case, because an inverse relation between reach and number of followers is hard to not be noticed. It’s hard to miss detecting the fact that a page with a huge amount of followers has a very tiny amount of engagement compared to the average or expected amount of engagement that such a number of followers should get.
That kind of engagement rate is used just for self assessment, not that it counts as a verification metric by the system.

The engagement rate that significantly increases the reach and definitely counts is the amount of engagement that a post gets per unit time, which indicates without a shadow of a doubt that such a post is doing good in terms of the attention it’s getting. Also another engagement rate that matters is how many of the people whom the post was sent out to actually responded in any way to the post and engaged with it as determined against their normal engagement behavior with such posts.

Also bots don’t have a feed, and so the posts never get sent out to them. Instead the bots chase the post manually. Also if someone doesn’t engage enough, the system stops sending them your posts, so their lack of engagement will stop indicating that your post is bad. Also Instagram knows that the bots behavior is not your fault so they don’t punish you because of them by decreasing your reach. Tell me what you think about this.