How do I calculate Engagement Rate?

Engagement rate is the number of engagements (eg. Likes, shares, comments, clicks) that your post or page has from your audience.

Tracking your engagement rate lets you calculate how interesting your content is to your audiences. The more your audiences interact with your content, the more likely they are to be your advocates and customers.

Compared to the engagement metric, engagement rate gives better insight into your content because it takes into account the number of people who view the post. That being said, there are 2 main calculations for engagement rate for social media.

Calculation 1:

Engagement Rate = Engagement / Reach X 100%

 Reach represents the number of people who have viewed your post, whereas engagement is the number of people who have interacted with it. With engagement over reach, you get a very good gauge of the percentage of viewers who have interacted with your post.

This calculation of engagement rate is perfect for your own social media pages, but might not be suitable for comparing engagement rate against your competitor’s engagement rates.

The reason is simple, the Reach metric of your competitor’s social media pages is not easily obtainable. For comparison with other social media pages, use Calculation 2 instead.

Calculation 2:

Engagement Rate = Engagement / Number of Followers X 100%

This calculation is more suitable for comparison against competitor social media pages, but is not as accurate. After all, not all of your followers would have seen your post, and not all who have seen your post might be your followers as well.

Engagement rate is possibility one of the most important stats to track when you want to determine the strength of your content. Engagement rate might rise and over according to the seasons, social media platform algorithms and other factors.

Plot a graph of engagement rate over time to find trends. Analyse and tweak your social media content with an aim to increase your engagement rate over time.