Students today might strive to be social media marketers, content creators, or brand ambassadors, if they’re not already influencers! The career options for the social media savvy are vast and the list of social media-oriented jobs grows each year as technology changes and new platforms emerge.
Social media math activities for middle school students
The first activity in this downloadable, designed for middle school math students, challenges them to calculate percent engagement on a social media platform to make a case—mathematically—for who is the bigger influencer.
The big takeaway for math class? Social media marketers and influencers pay attention to quantitative metrics that describe how their posts are performing. The number of likes, comments, saves, shares, followers, and views that users receive on social media is important. And understanding these engagement metrics can help businesses better understand their consumers or audience.
Let’s look at a sample post, where the top icons refer to likes (heart), comments (chat bubble), shares (arrow), and saves (bookmark), and reach refers to the number of times the content was displayed and available for someone to view on Instagram:
When comparing these post insights to the post’s reach, the percentages might seem very low:
- 8.6% of the audience who saw the post liked the post (453/5,251).
- 0.5% of the audience who saw the post clicked on our profile (26/5,251).
- 1.5% of the audience who saw the post shared or saved the post (43/5,251 + 34/5,251).
Getting likes, views, and saves is more work than many people realize!
Another commonly used statistic compares likes to followers. This sample post received 453 likes on an account that has 3,051 followers (not shown). Convert the fraction 453/3,051 into a percentage to see that the post reached a 14.8% engagement rate. Not bad!
Instagram and other social media companies strategically offer numerical summaries like the ones above, where the numbers alone don’t mean much until you compare them in the right way. An Instagram user may look at a reach of 5,000, for example, and erroneously interpret that as strong engagement because 5,000 seems like a large audience. The numbers tell a different story, however, when we see how many people actually engaged with the post. Applying ratio, proportion, and percent to measure engagement and growth on social media is a real strategy that social gurus use—and one that math teachers can practice!
The second activity in this downloadable, for students in Grades 7–9, asks students to practice calculating ratios and percentages to identify the mock Instagram profile with the most engagement. Once students have completed the activity, here are some possible discussion questions for them to discuss or write about:
- Which account has the most followers? Does that account have the most engagement? Why or why not?
- Which account has the most average likes? Does that account have the most engagement? Why or why not?
- Imagine you are given $1,000 to support one of the influencers or brands on your worksheet. You know that high level of engagement often means a higher profit for the product or influencer. Whom do you support? Explain your choice.
You can ground this activity firmly in the real world. Have students select a real brand, person, or product on Instagram, and ask them to complete a similar engagement analysis. Tell them not to choose someone they know personally. There’s space for the analysis at the bottom of the activity sheet.
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MATH 180 is a program devoted to showing the math behind all sorts of careers, including those in the social media world.
This blog, originally published in 2020, has been updated for 2025.
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