What Is a Good Engagement Rate for Influencers?

A brand looks at two Toronto creators. One has 40,000 followers and posts that pull 300 likes. The other has 6,000 followers and pulls 400 likes on a normal week. The second account is doing more with less, and follower count alone would never have shown that. Engagement rate is the number that does. Here is how to calculate it, what counts as good by tier, and how to tell a real number from a bought one.

The formula

Engagement rate is the share of an account's audience that actually interacts with a post, expressed as a percentage. The common version:

(Likes + comments) / followers × 100

A post with 6,000 followers that gets 350 likes and 30 comments: (350 + 30) / 6,000 × 100 = 6.3%.

Some tools add saves and shares to the numerator, which pushes the number higher and is worth knowing when you compare two rates from two different sources. A media kit quoting 9% and a manual calculation landing at 6% for the same account are not necessarily lying to you. They may just be counting different things. Ask what's included before you compare two numbers against each other.

Two variants matter beyond the basic formula:

• Per-post rate: one post's engagement divided by followers. Useful for judging a specific piece of content.
• Average rate: the mean across several recent posts, usually 8 to 12. This is the one that actually tells you something about an account, since any single post can spike or flop for reasons that have nothing to do with the audience's normal behaviour.

Always use the average. A single viral post skews the per-post number in a way that doesn't repeat.

What counts as good, by tier

Commonly cited industry benchmarks put nano accounts (roughly 1,000 to 10,000 followers) around 4% to 8% engagement. Micro accounts (roughly 10,000 to 100,000) tend to run 1% to 2%. Treat these as rough ranges, not physics: they shift by platform, by format, and by year, and nobody publishes an audited number for the Toronto market specifically. We cover the same ranges in Micro vs nano creators: which fits a Toronto brand?, which walks through why the pattern holds.

The direction is consistent even where the exact numbers move: smaller accounts skew toward people who know the creator, or know someone who does. Bigger accounts skew toward strangers who followed a clip that traveled once. Strangers scroll past. Neighbours comment.

So "good" depends entirely on tier. A 3% rate is disappointing on a 4,000-follower account and strong on a 60,000-follower one. Judging every creator against the same flat number, regardless of size, is the single most common vetting mistake we see brands make.

Reading the number, not just the percentage

A high rate on its own doesn't tell you whether the audience is real or whether it's local. Three checks turn a percentage into a decision:

Read the comments, not just the count. Thirty comments that are one-word emoji reactions from accounts with no photo and no bio are a different signal than ten comments that reference specifics: a street name, a past order, a plan to visit this weekend. Count matters less than content.

Check where the audience is, not just how big it is. Toronto creator rates: what nano and micro cost in 2026 covers what these tiers actually cost once you've picked one; the pricing only makes sense once you've confirmed the audience you're paying for is in the city you're trying to reach. An account can have a healthy engagement rate and a geographically useless audience at the same time.

Watch for a rate that's suspiciously smooth. A real audience is noisy. Some posts do better, some worse, tied to time of day, topic, and plain luck. An account where every single post lands within a point of the same percentage, post after post, is a pattern worth asking about directly. It doesn't prove anything on its own, but it's a reason to look closer before you book.

The usual inflators

A few things push engagement rate up without meaning the audience is more real:

• Engagement pods. Groups of creators who agree to like and comment on each other's posts within minutes of publishing, regardless of interest. This is common enough at the micro tier that a suspiciously fast, suspiciously uniform comment pattern in the first ten minutes is worth a second look.
• Giveaways. "Follow and comment to win" posts spike engagement for one post and mean almost nothing about normal behaviour. If a media kit's headline number is built on a giveaway post, ask for the average across non-giveaway content instead.
• Bought engagement. Less common than bought followers, but it exists. The same comment-quality check above is the fastest way to catch it: generic, interchangeable comments from low-activity accounts are the tell.

None of these are reasons to walk away automatically. They're reasons to ask a direct question and see how the creator answers it. A creator with nothing to hide will usually just tell you which posts were giveaways.

Engagement rate is one input, not the whole decision

A high engagement rate is a good sign. It is not the only sign, and treating it as a scorecard misses what actually predicts a good collaboration: does this creator's audience look like your customer, is their content quality something you'd want your brand next to, and can they hit a brief and a deadline. Influencers in Toronto: how to find and hire them covers the fuller vetting process; engagement rate is the fastest first filter in that process, not the last check.

It's also not something you should expect a creator to hit on command. A creator can't manufacture a higher engagement rate for your campaign specifically. It's a property of the relationship they've already built with their audience, which is exactly why it's worth checking before you book rather than being disappointed by it after.

Where Sixth Degree fits

We're building toward verification that includes engagement, not just follower counts: a human check on the numbers a creator reports, alongside the identity and account checks every creator already goes through. Nothing here is live yet. Sixth Degree is in private beta, opening Fall 2026, and this describes where the product is headed, not a finished feature.

What we won't do is claim we can tell you a creator's "true" engagement rate down to a decimal, or promise a rate translates directly into sales. It doesn't. It's a vetting signal, a good one, and the calculation above takes five minutes on any creator's last dozen posts. Run it before you reach out. It's the cheapest due diligence in influencer marketing.

Questions about vetting a specific creator or campaign? Email hello@sixthdegree.app. We answer everything.