Best practice, snore. Have we lost you already? We’ll keep it short and sweet. Here’s the lowdown on why you should care about engagement rate and how to calculate it. Gold stars are given out at the end (maybe…)
When it comes to social, vanity metrics such as likes, impressions, followers and views used to be enough. Now, when it comes to judging the success of video content at awareness level, there’s a better way. Engagement rate is simple – it’s a formula that measures the amount of interaction social content earns relative to reach or other audience figures.
Here’s why you should care…
- Engagement refers to actions that are active rather than passive (e.g. views or impressions)
- Audience growth is important but it loses its meaning if your audience doesn’t care about/for your content.
- Engagement rate shows how much your audience values your content, how much it resonates with them.
- It represents the status of your relationship with your audience. Willing to engage is the first step to be willing to turn into a customer/ brand advocate.
- On Instagram specifically, brands that are producing consistently engaging content are more likely to be rewarded by the algorithm and have their content shown more frequently in users’ timelines.
What’s an engagement?
First you must decide what you’re going to count as an engagement, this may vary by platform.
Decide upfront, which of the below you’re going to count as an engagement on each platform and keep it consistent:
- Reactions
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Saves
- Direct messages
- Mentions (tagged or untagged)
- Click-throughs
- Clicks
- Profile visits
- Link clicks
- Use of branded hashtags
- Calls
- Texts
Instagram only
- Sticker taps (Stories)
- Emails (if linked in bio)
- Get Directions (Instagram only)
How to calculate engagement rate
There’s no one agreed method to calculate engagement rate, we recommend by reach. This way your rate is representing the percentage of people who’ve been served the post who felt compelled to take some kind of action.
The Pros of this method – not all your followers will see your content, so reach is a more accurate measure of whose eyeballs have been offered your content. It will also include non-followers who have seen it through shares, hashtags and other ways.
The Cons of this method – Reach can fluctuate (thanks algorithms!) a sudden low reach can lead to disproportionately high engagement rate and vice versa, so it’s worth considering this.
The Maths
ERR (Engagement Rate by Reach) = Total post engagements / reach of post *100
That will give you a post’s engagement rate.
To apply this at a campaign level, simply average the engagement rate across a number of posts that support a single campaign within one platform.
What’s a ‘good’ engagement rate?
With the Engagement Rate calculated by reach (as above) your engagement rate is more likely to be at the higher end than if you were calculating by followers or impressions (the way some go about calculating it). This is why it becomes near impossible to benchmark against other brands, and why there’s such a range of ‘good’ engagement rates, because others could be calculating based on impressions/ followers/reach.
Broadly speaking – between 1-5% engagement rate is considered good.
Note: while it’s hard to compare your own brand to competitors or aspirational ones, it’s still important to benchmark against yourself.
- Above 1% engagement rate is good.
- 0.5%-0.99% is average.
- Below 0.5% engagement is missing the mark.
In 2021 average engagement rate on a Facebook post was 0.18%, add video and it was 0.26%.
Survey results vary but it’s safe to say the average engagement rate for a business on Instagram is between 1-5%.
So there you have it, engagement rate in a nutshell! Now, get that excel out and get to it… Unless you can’t think of anything worse, in which case we know a data head who would love to nerd out over your stats...
