Report: Instagram Engagement in 2021: Data-Driven Strategies for Cutting Through the Noise

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Mastering Instagram Engagement in 2021: Data-Driven Strategies for Cutting Through the Noise

Instagram has evolved from a simple photo-sharing app to an indispensable business platform for connecting with audiences and driving growth. With over 1 billion monthly active users, 25+ million business accounts, and a projected $18 billion in ad revenue this year, Instagram presents immense opportunities — and intense competition — for brands.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which sparked a massive surge in Instagram usage during lockdowns, businesses are now vying for attention from a newly captive audience. Standing out and driving engagement has never been more crucial or challenging.

To help brands elevate their Instagram game, we conducted an in-depth analysis of 100 million posts across 1 million users, plus over 2 million geotagged posts. This original data report uncovers the latest trends around content, hashtags, locations, captions, influencers, and engagement to shape a powerful, insight-fueled Instagram marketing strategy for 2021.

Follower Counts and Influencer Marketing: Breaking Through the Numbers Game

Accumulating Instagram followers is one of the biggest challenges brands face today. A robust, engaged following is the foundation for amplifying your content and connecting with receptive audiences primed for conversion. Yet with over half of Instagram users having fewer than 1,000 followers, cutting through the noise is exceedingly difficult.

Our data found that accounts with over 100K followers represent just 1.04% of the Instagram population, further highlighting the uphill battle for brands aiming to cultivate an influential, highly visible presence. To grow and maintain a significant following requires meticulous focus on not just content quality, but engagement optimization across every facet of your Instagram strategy.

Herein lies the power — and prominence — of influencer marketing, which emerged from Instagram and is projected to become a $13.8 billion industry by the end of 2021. Brand-influencer partnerships help penetrate the barriers of traditional advertising, enabling more authentic connection with intended audiences.

Our data identified the top 50 most-followed Instagram accounts (40% female, 60% male), which can guide influencer partnership strategies or areas of focus. James Charles (@jamescharles) tops the influencer list with over 24 million followers, followed by the @tiktok account, reflecting the surging trend of cross-promotional TikTok content on Instagram.

Interestingly, while celebrities and pop culture icons predictably populate much of the top 50, brands are also heavily represented. Global powerhouses such as @lamborghini (28.5M followers), @netflixbrasil (22M), @anastasiabeverlyhills (20M), and @givenchyofficial (14.2M) demonstrate the platform's immense potential for building brand recognition and communities at scale.

Perhaps most notably, over half the top 50 most engaged tagged accounts were beauty and cosmetic brands like @fentybeauty, @sheinofficial, and @colourpopcosmetics. This points to the explosive success of the beauty vertical on Instagram, and a prime opportunity for related brands to harness the power of influencer campaigns and user-generated content.

For brands seeking to capitalize on this potential, focusing on quality over quantity with influencer collaborations is paramount. Foster relationships with influential accounts and ambassadors that align with your brand ethos and resonate powerfully with your target demographics. A thoughtful, selective influencer strategy will drive far greater returns than a scattershot approach aiming for max impressions.

Content Strategies for Winning Audience Attention and Engagement

Once you've built a solid community around your brand, the ultimate challenge is capturing that audience's attention and earning engagement with your content. This has grown increasingly difficult as social platforms constantly evolve their algorithms to prioritize newer, more interactive content formats.

Our 2021 data reflects this shift, with photo carousels overtaking single image and video posts as the most engaging type of Instagram content. Carousels now generate an average of 62 likes and 5 comments per post — the standard metric for quantifying engagement. Closely following are video posts, at 888 likes and 24 comments on average.

Single image posts, once the predominant content format, have taken a back seat as audiences gravitate toward more dynamic, interactive content experiences. This trend underscores the importance of varying your Instagram content mix to include clickable, immersive visuals that command attention and engagement.

A potent content strategy for 2021 should incorporate all of Instagram's multimedia publishing options: standard image and video posts, photo carousels, Instagram Stories, Reels, and IGTV. Reels, Instagram's TikTok-inspired short video experience launched in 2020, presents a powerful opportunity for brands to embrace video creativity and leverage the surging popularity of cross-promoted TikTok content.

To further enhance engagement, create audience-activated experiences through your content. Ask questions in posts or Stories, crowd-source input for new products or campaigns, invite user-generated submissions through tools like Instagram's "Collab" feature. The more interactivity and participatory actions you can inspire, the stronger your brand community becomes.

Optimizing Your Captions for Quality Engagement

With Instagram's immense visual focus, it's easy to overlook the importance of compelling written communication. However, our data confirms that crafting thoughtful, detailed captions has a significant and measurable impact on post engagement.

The "sweet spot" for maximizing likes and comments falls within the 500–1,000 and 1,000–2,000 character ranges. Overshooting that upper limit causes engagement rates to drop precipitously. Meanwhile, cursory captions under 125 characters — Instagram's character recommendation — yield lackluster results.

This contradicts the common notion that audiences have brief attention spans, with little patience for long-form captions. In reality, Instagram users are primed to spend time engaging with content that provides depth and context. Quality storytelling and brand narratives matter just as much — arguably more — than crafting quippy, disposable microcopy.

Tell compelling stories that draw audiences in and forge emotional connections with your brand's human side. Use descriptive language to elaborate on the inspiration, meaning, or history behind visuals. Pose reflective or provocative questions that spur discussion. By creating space for commentary and discourse, you actively invite community participation and engagement.

That said, don't stretch for length or embellishment at the expense of authenticity. The best Instagram captions strike a balance between brevity and substance, providing value proportional to their word count. If a succinct turn of phrase suffices, leave the storytelling for more substantive posts.

Hashtag Strategies: From Discovery to Intentional Brand Storytelling

Of course, any discussion around Instagram engagement inevitably involves hashtags and their continuing relevance in a shifting landscape.

While the use of popular, generic hashtags like #love and #instagood remains prevalent among casual users, brands have gotten more strategic and intentional with hashtag deployment — for good reason. Our data indicates that overly popular hashtags dilute engagement, whereas targeted niche hashtags resonate far better with specific interest audiences.

The optimal hashtag strategy involves curating a mix of location-based, interest-based, and branded/campaign-driven hashtags tailored to each individual post. The magic number is just one — posts with only a single hashtag tended to garner the highest engagement spikes. Use additional hashtags, within Instagram's 30 hashtag limit, to capture related long-tail interest audiences and subtopics.

Some examples from our top hashtags for driving engagement:

#bollywood

#tbt ("throwback Thursday")

#wildlife

#couplegoals

#tiktok

#dog, #cats, #catstagram

#quotes, #meme, #video

#inspirationalquotes, #quoteoftheday, #repost

Note how many of these are themed around specific interests, content formats, and cultural phenomena. They hint at the passions and subcultures of audiences you may aim to engage through use of these hashtags.

Location Strategies for Reaching Local Audiences Speaking of locally relevant content, location-tagged posts proved particularly effective for boosting engagement and brand discovery. According to the Social Report, posts tagged with a location generated 79% higher engagement compared to those without a location.

Our data analysis identified the top cities tagged globally, as well as the top engagement rates by location. For brands operating locally, regionally, or nationally, these insights can shape an intelligent location-based posting strategy to maximize your impact.

Worldwide, Los Angeles took the top spot as the most location-tagged city for the second consecutive year, followed by London, New York, Paris, and São Paulo. In terms of engagement, however, Beverly Hills far outranked all others — a possible indication of Instagram's LA-centric cultural bias toward luxury lifestyle and celebrity content.

Other high-engagement cities included Naples, Mumbai, Paris, and several smaller locales like Stuttgart and Bristol. Notably, while the U.S. accounted for the highest volume of location-tagged posts, American cities ranked lower for engagement rates compared to European, South Asian, and Middle Eastern locations.

For brands seeking to drive local engagement and visibility, make location tagging a core part of your content strategy. Add geographic tags not just to image posts, but Stories, Reels, IGTVs—any content format featuring your physical location or surroundings. You can even create a dedicated location tag for your business once it gains traction.

If you operate nationwide or globally, analyze the engagement trends by city and region. Allocate more resources toward locations with higher engagement rates aligned with your target demographics. For certain products or campaigns, more niche geographic audiences may prove more receptive than broad ones.

Optimal Timing for When to Post

The science behind determining the unequivocal "best time" to post on Instagram is complex and constantly evolving. Our data provides some high-level guiding insights, which you can further refine by studying the online behaviors of your specific audience.

Overall engagement peaks twice daily: first around 12–1pm, coinciding with midday work breaks or lunch hours; then more substantially between 6–8pm, when users are winding down and transitioning into pre-bedtime content consumption mode.

Sunday sees a slight uptick over other days, though variances across the week are relatively minimal. This suggests consistent, daily posting may be optimal—rather than inundating followers with heavy volumes any single day, a steady content cadence keeps your brand top-of-mind and working seamlessly into audience routines.

However, we did uncover some significant geographic variations worth noting for location-based audiences:

In India, Tuesday is the strongest engagement day, with pronounced morning (9am) and evening (6pm) spikes.

In São Paulo, Monday triggers peak engagement, with the evening spike starting earlier around 6pm.

Paris sees its highest engagement levels on Saturday, while the morning and evening engagementspikes occur slightly earlier than average (7am and 6pm respectively).

Los Angeles bucks the typical "after-work" evening spike, with engagement peaking hard at 5am before declining through the rest of the day. Sunday is peak engagement day.

New York's prime engagement period is mid-day, with strong afternoon/evening levels until 3am, when engagement picks up again ahead of the workday.

London aligns closer to the global average, with an evening spike at 6pm and lower overnight engagement. Tuesday and Friday are the top engagement days.

Equipped with this localized data, you can strategically plan content deployment to align with the periods when your geographic target audiences are most actively engaged. Tailor your posting cadences and pay close attention to time zones to ensure your content has maximum visible impact.

The Future of Instagram Marketing: A Holistic, Data-Driven Approach

At its core, succeeding on Instagram in 2021 requires a holistic, insights-fueled strategy that accounts for every engagement vector and nuance of your audience. A disconnected, siloed approach to content publishing, influencer campaigns, location tagging, and timing simply won't move the needle enough to rise above the intensifying fray.

The brands winning on Instagram will be those that meticulously study their audience's behavioral patterns and content consumption habits—then develop highly calculated strategies to engage them ubiquitously. Post at the right cadences and time windows. Deploy a diverse content mix tailored to platform trends and individual demographic appetites. Leverage influencers, locations, hashtag taxonomies, and caption narratives in harmonious synchronicity.

Above all, continually analyze and optimize your strategies based on evolving data and first-party audience intelligence. The Instagram landscape is endlessly shape-shifting; brands that remain agile and responsive, rather than static, will maintain their competitive edge.

Ultimately, engaging your audience on Instagram requires first understanding them as multidimensional individuals with distinct interests, behaviors, and motivations—not just nameless, faceless numbers in an analytics dashboard. The data and insights explored here are designed to illuminate those human dimensions and complexities.

With that enlightened perspective, you can forge meaningful, resonant connections through your Instagram presence. You can publish content tailored to how audiences prefer consuming it—whether long-form storytelling or bite-sized visuals, location-centric or globally minded, centering influencers or branded directly. Every post, hashtag, caption and comment becomes another enlightening data point informing your larger engagement strategy.

Instagram's continued evolution underscores an urgent need for brands to adopt a more scientifically rigorous, experimentally minded approach to their social marketing. Gone are the days of haphazard guesswork and intuition-based posting. The competitive landscape, algorithmic volatility, and sheer volume of ingrained audience behaviors demand a more calculated methodology.

Analytics platforms have become indispensable for aggregating Instagram performance data across accounts and content types. Social listening and monitoring tools reveal troves of audience intelligence around sentiment, voice, and psychographics. With AI capabilities, natural language processing can even be employed to derive deeper meaning from conversational data and qualitative signals.

Complementing those advanced data sources, the fundamental principles of market research, A/B testing, and iterative optimization must be applied to every execution on Instagram. Systematically test creative approaches, themes, formats, caption tactics, and timing windows. Analyze engagement fluctuations and trends over time based on those variations. Constantly refine and reimagine your Instagram strategy to align with the latest empirical evidence.

Embracing this data-driven mindset is the only sustainable path for brands seeking to achieve epic growth and devoted communities on Instagram in 2021 and beyond. Combining the troves of available data and insights with authentic creativity, storytelling prowess, and an unrelenting spirit of experimentation will breed success.

The competitive barriers have never been higher for making an indelible impact on Instagram. But for brands prepared to commit to a rigorous, endlessly iterative mastery of their audience through data—the engagement opportunities are boundless.

Instagram is no longer just a singular platform, but a portal into the hearts and minds of over a billion potential brand ambassadors across every culture, demographic, passion, and plane of stylistic expression imaginable. Those with the dedication to decode and reciprocate that human connection authentically will emerge as the engagement titans of this era.

Download the full report.

*report from HubSpot X mention