Media Kits

The Instagram Media Kit: Which Numbers, and Where They Live

Instagram gives you more metrics than belong on a kit. Which ones a brand actually reads, where to find each in the app, and the two that look impressive while telling a partnerships manager nothing.

By Dennis Tjahyadi · Founder, KitVerifyPublished September 15, 20268 min read

What Instagram will tell you about yourself

Instagram Insights (Creator / Business accounts)

Profile: followers, following, posts
Total audience: gender, age brackets, top cities and countries
Content: reach, impressions, likes, comments, saves, shares per post
Reels: plays, watch time, average watch time

Instagram hands you dozens of metrics and roughly six of them belong on a media kit. The rest are either operational — useful for deciding what to post — or actively misleading when a brand reads them out of context.

This is the platform-specific version of the question: which Instagram numbers to put on a kit, where each one lives in the app, which of them come out through the official API without any copying by hand, and which two look impressive while telling a partnerships manager nothing they can use.

The six numbers, and exactly where each one is

Number	Where in the app	Why a brand wants it
Followers	Profile header	Sets the size bracket and the rough budget band
Engagement rate	Not a field — computed from recent posts	The quality signal; the one number they sanity-check
Reach, last 30 days	Insights → Overview → Accounts reached	What a post is likely to actually deliver
Gender split	Insights → Total audience → Gender	Whether the audience matches the brief
Age brackets	Insights → Total audience → Age range	Same, and it decides which products are even legal to promote
Top countries / cities	Insights → Total audience → Top locations	Whether the campaign can ship there

Every figure below is in the app today — no third-party tool required.

Engagement rate: the number everybody quotes and nobody defines

Instagram does not give you an engagement rate. Every figure you have ever seen quoted was computed by someone, using one of several formulas that disagree with each other — sometimes by a factor of two or three. Quoting one without saying which is the most common credibility leak on an Instagram media kit.

Over followers — (likes + comments) ÷ followers. The most widely used, the easiest for a brand to check, and the one most benchmark tables are built on.
Over reach or impressions — the same numerator over how many people actually saw the post. Usually a much larger number, and not comparable to the benchmarks anyone will hold it against.
Mean vs median posts — an average lets one unusually good post lift your whole rate; a median describes a normal post. The median is the more honest input and the less flattering one.

KitVerify uses the median of your recent posts over followers, which is the conservative combination: comparable to published benchmarks, and immune to a single viral post. The Instagram engagement rate calculator computes it and shows the formula alongside, so the kit carries a number you can source rather than assert. The full reasoning is in the methodology.

The two numbers that mislead

Both appear constantly on Instagram media kits and both hurt more than they help.

Impressions

Impressions count views, not viewers — one person who sees your post four times is four impressions. It is always the biggest number in Insights, which is why it ends up on kits, and a partnerships manager reading it knows to divide it by something. Reach, which counts unique accounts, is the smaller and far more useful figure. Leading with impressions signals that you picked the number that flattered you.

Total lifetime likes

A cumulative figure across everything you have ever posted. It grows forever and describes nothing about how a post will perform next month. Brands are buying future performance; a number that can only go up is not evidence about it.

What the API will hand over, and what it will not

This matters because it determines which parts of your kit can maintain themselves and which parts you will always be typing in.

Comes through the official API

Follower count
Recent posts: likes, comments, media type, permalink
Profile name, biography, profile picture
From which an engagement rate can be computed

Never comes through it

What you charge
Who your audience is, in a sentence a brand can act on
Which past work you want to lead with
Your contact preference and usage terms
Audience demographics for an account that has not connected

That split is the whole reason a media kit is part automated and part written. The left column can keep itself current indefinitely. The right column is judgement, and it is also the half that differentiates you from another creator with identical follower counts.

Reels, Stories and the rest

Most brand briefs on Instagram now ask for Reels, so a kit that only describes in-feed performance is answering a question that is no longer being asked. If you post Reels regularly, add typical plays and average watch time — watch time in particular is the metric that separates a Reel that was scrolled past from one that was watched, and comparatively few kits carry it.

Stories are worth a line if you sell them as a deliverable: typical views per frame and your completion rate across a set. Both are in Insights, and both are genuinely hard for a brand to estimate from the outside, which makes them useful to state.

If Instagram is not your only platform

Keep the platforms on separate lines, always. A combined figure reads as concealment, and the two platforms' engagement rates are not even the same kind of measurement — Instagram's is sensibly computed over followers, while TikTok's has to be computed over views, because the For You page means most of a TikTok audience does not follow you. Presenting them side by side as one metric is comparing different things. The TikTok version covers that in detail.

Where KitVerify fits

KitVerify reads the left-hand column above through Instagram's official API: you paste a handle or connect the account, and follower count, recent posts and the computed engagement rate arrive labelled Synced with the date they were pulled. You fill in the right-hand column — audience breakdown, positioning, rates, contact — and those render as Self-reported, because they are.

What it will not do is invent audience demographics for an account that has not connected, or present a self-reported figure as a platform number. That constraint is the point of the labelling system rather than a limitation of it.

The media kit generator starts from a handle and needs no account. For a manager maintaining this across a roster of creators, the same record sits behind creator management software.

What should be in an Instagram media kit?

Six numbers — followers, engagement rate with its formula named, typical 30-day reach, gender split, age brackets and top locations — plus your best three recent posts with their own figures, a sentence on who your audience is, your rates, and an email address. Everything else Instagram shows you is operational: useful for deciding what to post, not for a brand deciding whether to hire you.

Can I make an Instagram media kit with a personal account?

You can make one, but it will be missing the section brands ask for most. Personal accounts do not expose audience demographics — no gender split, no age brackets, no top locations — and those are the numbers that decide whether you fit a brief. Switching to a Creator account is free, takes about a minute, and changes nothing about how your profile appears to followers.

What is a good engagement rate on Instagram?

It depends heavily on your follower count, because smaller audiences engage at much higher rates. Accounts under 10,000 followers commonly sit in the low-to-mid single digits as a percentage, and the typical rate falls steadily as accounts grow into the hundreds of thousands. Compare yourself against your own follower tier rather than a single global figure — a rate that looks modest for a nano account can be strong for a macro one.

Should I put impressions or reach on my media kit?

Reach. Impressions count views rather than viewers, so one person seeing a post four times counts four times — it is always the larger number, which is exactly why brands discount it. Reach counts unique accounts, which is what a partnerships manager is actually trying to estimate. Leading with impressions tends to read as having picked the flattering metric.

How do I get my Instagram audience demographics?

Insights → Total audience, on a Creator or Business account. It gives you gender split, age brackets and top cities and countries. There is no way to get this for an account you do not control — Instagram does not expose another account's demographics through any compliant route, which is why every kit that carries them was either built by the creator or built from a connection the creator approved.

KitVerify

Get the Instagram half without typing it.

Paste your handle: follower count, recent posts and your computed engagement rate come back through the official API, labelled Synced with the date they were pulled. You add the audience breakdown, rates and contact that no API returns.

Open the media kit generatoror see build an Instagram media kit and Instagram engagement rate calculator

About the author

Dennis Tjahyadi · Founder, KitVerify

KitVerify is being built around the workflows of talent managers and creator agencies. This blog documents what we are learning about how those teams organize, maintain and pitch their talent — from product research, conversations with managers, and observing real workflows, not from having managed talent ourselves.