Instagram posts with a call to action get 203% more comments and 92% more saves, but slightly fewer likes

Content formats

Engagement metric (avg per post)	All posts	Posts with CTA	Change with CTA (%)
Comments	44.18	133.78	203%
Saved	93.21	179.16	92%
Likes	629.86	598.83	-5%

Instagram engagement: all posts vs posts with a CTA (comments, saves, likes)

Reader Note:: Posts that carry a call to action were not chosen at random - whoever wrote one decided to, and those posts differ in other ways too. The comparison is an average across all account sizes and industries.
Evidence:: Observed behaviour
Vendor interest:: Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
Sample:: 24,364,803 Instagram posts from 375,118 accounts worldwide, covering January and February 2025 and January and February 2026 — a two-month window, not a full year. Accounts with zero publications were excluded, as were posts with zero impressions or zero interactions, so every average in the study is computed over posts that got at least one interaction. Accounts were segmented by follower size into Huge (1M+), Big (100K-1M), Medium (10K-100K), Small (2K-10K) and Tiny (0-2K). Outliers were not removed. Growth has a non-obvious definition: an account counts as having grown only if it crossed into a higher follower tier, so an account that went from 3K to 9K followers is not counted as having grown, and the study's own methodology notes that crossing Tiny to Small takes far fewer new followers than crossing Medium to Big — growth rates are therefore not comparable across tiers.

Good for

Comparing yourself against a similar segment, and choosing what to test next.

Saying that one thing caused another, or predicting what you would get.
This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
The two groups were not split at random — they picked their own side. The difference may have been there before anything was measured.
This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.

Instagram users respond first to brand’s short videos, then creator-style content

Share of social users most likely to interact with each brand content type on Instagram
Content type	Share of users likely to interact (%)
Short-form video (<60 seconds)	52%
User-generated content	25%
Influencer content	23%
Live video	22%
Static images / Long-form video	19%

Short videos dominate brand engagement on TikTok

Share of social users most likely to interact with brand content types on TikTok
Content type	Share of social users likely to interact (%)
Short-form video (<60 seconds)	60%
Long-form video	32%
User-generated content	30%
Influencer content	28%
GIFs / memes	15%

Interactive Instagram content did the most to build brand trust

Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.

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