A president's account is the smallest audience your institution owns and the one that out-performs every other handle you run. It is also the only account where a misjudged sentence becomes a personnel story rather than a correction.
Medians across 174 tracked presidential Instagram accounts · last 30 days
5.7%
+4.0 pt vs main accountsengagements ÷ followers
1.6
-1.7 posts/wk vs main accountsposts / week
Food Content
7.5% median ER · 38 posts
+3.0%
+1.6 pt vs main accountsfollowers, last 30 days
Across 161 tracked presidential Instagram accounts, the median engagement rate is 5.7 percent, and across 174 the median cadence is 1.6 posts per week.
President and chancellor accounts post most on Fridays between 12 and 4 PM local time, across 174 tracked accounts.
Across 38 Food Content posts in the last 30 days, tracked presidential Instagram accounts earn a median engagement rate of 7.5 percent — the highest of any content type.
Across 38 posts in this category, Food Content posts have a median engagement rate of 7.5 percent.
Across 287 posts in this category, Athletic posts have a median engagement rate of 6.3 percent.
Across 78 posts in this category, Homecoming posts have a median engagement rate of 5.3 percent.
Among the 11 tracked institutions with Under 1K students, the median follower count is 522 followers.
Among the 66 tracked institutions with 1K – 5K students, the median follower count is 1,589.5 followers.
Among the 38 tracked institutions with 5K – 10K students, the median follower count is 1,709 followers.
Among the 22 tracked institutions with 10K – 20K students, the median follower count is 2,252 followers.
Among the 24 tracked institutions with 20K – 30K students, the median follower count is 5,035 followers.
Among the 13 tracked institutions with 30K+ students, the median follower count is 8,146 followers.
Figures cover the last 30 days of posts. Last updated October 6, 2026.
Explore the full Instagram benchmarks →President and chancellor accounts grow a median +3.0 percent in 30 days on Instagram, across 170 accounts.
On Instagram, the median 30-day follower growth across 170 tracked accounts is +3.0 percent.
The named account of a sitting president or chancellor, usually drafted by a communications staffer and read by trustees, faculty, donors, legislators and reporters at once. One person's signature sits on every word.
Drafts route to a chief of staff before anything publishes, the voice stays consistent across whoever is ghostwriting that week, and the account's numbers sit beside the institution's own rather than in a separate quarterly report.
The office handle it out-engages anchors the wider portfolio, whose graduates are courted by the advancement side.
Communications staff draft, route and schedule presidential posts in Reach, and weigh the account's engagement against the institution's own handle. Detailed accounts follow as institutions are ready to share them.
Scale works against the main handle: a president speaks to a few thousand people who chose to follow a named human, not to an institution's entire public. The medians above state the sample size each figure was drawn from.
Almost always a communications staffer, and that is not a problem as long as the voice holds steady. What readers punish is a feed whose register visibly changes every time the person drafting it changes.
Name a single approver rather than a committee, and pre-clear the recurring moments — convocation, commencement, move-in weekend — so the queue holds only the posts that genuinely need someone to decide.
That is a cabinet call, not a social media one. What the platform owes you is an immediate hold on the scheduled queue, so a light-hearted post cannot publish itself into a serious week.
Less than the institution does — the tracked cohort's median cadence above sits well under the main handle's. On a named account presence reads as authenticity in a way sheer volume never does.
Reach measures how higher education social teams actually post, so you can compare your own accounts against the cohorts these figures come from and see the gap in your own numbers.