Engagement Rate

Engagement rate is a metric that is used to assess the level of engagement on any content that is posted online. Here, engagement refers to the level of interaction that is seen from followers or anyone else who has found your content. The most common forms of engagement are the number of likes, comments, and shares.

Calculating Engagement Rate

Your engagement rate can be calculated by finding the average number of interactions you get per follower and multiplying it by 100.

This one of the most commonly used formulas – (Total engagement/ Total number of followers) x 100.

Your total engagement will include the total of likes, shares, comments, views (for videos). But depending on the platform there are other forms of engagement that need to be included. For example, when calculating engagement rates for Twitter you’ll need to include the number of retweets and quote retweets. And for Facebook, you’ll need to add the number of reactions on your post to your total engagements.

You can also calculate your engagement rate for a specific post with the formula – (Total engagement on post / Total followers) x 100

If it’s a video post you can replace total followers with total video views in the formula above.

Lastly, you can calculate your engagement rate based on your reach, which is the number of people that see your content, instead of your total followers. This tends to be a more accurate representation of engagement as it is not a given that all of your followers have seen your posts and the common formula doesn’t take into account people that aren’t your followers that see your posts. This can be calculated by dividing total engagement on the post by the reach per post and then multiplying by 100 – (Total engagement on post/ Total reach per post) x 100.

What does your engagement rate tell you?

• Engagement rates can be used to track the performance of social media marketing campaigns.
• It provides a more comprehensive insight into how well your social media is performing, rather than just looking only at followers or likes it takes into account all types of engagements. It shows the extent to which people are responding to your content.
• The metric can be used as a means of comparison to see how well your brand is doing compared to predators.
• Engagement rates can be used to make decisions about content planning. You can track how well different types of content do on your account, which will help you better plan future content.