Measurement of Engagement Rate in Instagram (Case Study: Instagram Indonesian Government Ministry and Institutions)

Abstract

Based on the results of the United Nations e-government survey in 2018, Indonesia E-participation Index (EPI) is ranked 92 with the EPI index 0.618. Indonesia EPI index still lags behind that of neighboring countries, such as Malaysia EPI 0.8876 ranking 32, Philippines EPI 0.9382 ranking 19, Singapore EPI 0.9663 rank 13, and also still losing to Thailand EPI 0.6517 ranking 82 and Vietnam EPI 0.691 ranking 72. To improve the e-participation index score using social media is the right choice. Many countries have used social media to establish communication with their people. Next we have to know in advance how far is the level of citizen engagement to government social media? Of course by making measurements so that the engagement rate can be known. In this study, we propose a new formula to measure the level of citizen engagement on Instagram Indonesian government ministries and institutions. We conduct data mining to track and summarize engagement activities on the Instagram accounts of Ministries and Institutions for a period of one year, between 1 January - 31 December 2018. Instagram provides a RESTful Application Programming Interface (API) with the Scraping technique using a Ruby-based scraper program to make requests to Instagram servers and receive posts account details in JSON files. Then we convert data from JSON to CSV file for each account using the Ruby-based Parser program. The comparison evaluation results show that the proposed new formula uses more variables related to Engagement Rate (ER) so that it is more representative in describing the variables of the ER. The results of the correlation analysis also show that the higher the number of followers the lower the ER value so that the grouping takes the form of a Range of ER values based on the number of followers. The assessment of ER measurements revealed that 31 accounts of 61 Ministry and Institution Instagram accounts received low ER quality, which means that 50.82% of Ministry and Institution Instagram accounts have not been able to optimize their Instagram accounts to get engagement from their followers.