When we talk about social media metrics, we tend to focus on them individually. Likes, comments, and shares are siloed into their own categories. But just one metric isn’t enough to effectively analyze your strategy. And, even if you look at all of them together, it doesn’t tell the full story of how your content is performing. Enter, social media engagement rates. This mega-metrics gives you a comprehensive look at your content, how it’s performing, and how engaged your audience really is.
In this article, we’re giving you the rundown on social media engagement rates, including why you want to use them, a few we recommend, and a free tracker for your content strategies.
What is a Social Media Engagement Rate? 📱
Social media engagement rate is a metric used to gauge how actively your audience interacts with your content. You use interactions like likes, comments, shares, and saves and a baseline metric like followers to calculate how effectively your content resonates with your audience.
Social media engagement rates give you an honest, easy-to-digest view of how your content is performing. What you might think is a successful post or exponential growth might be less notable than you imagined. It also makes your content’s performance significantly easier to track. Rather than trying to compare a few different metrics across a variety of posts, you’re able to clearly see and compare your content’s performance.
Why Do I Need It? 🤔
Beyond reviewing your profile’s performance, there are a few reasons you’d need to know your engagement rate for a couple of reasons.
Partnerships
Brands and sponsors will likely ask for an engagement rate. They want to know their product will reach your followers, not sit on your profile without engagement. Building a consistent community is just as important as growing your following.
Strategy and Goals
Knowing your engagement rate can help you develop social strategies and track your growth. They can also help you analyze your content more in-depth and truly understand how your content is performing.
Portfolios
If you plan to start reaching out to brands or applying for social media jobs, you’ll need a portfolio…and you’ll want to include your engagement rate. This will show how your content performs, which can indicate if your audience trusts you.
Build Audience Trust
Engagement is a good indicator of audience interest and trust. Engagement rates can help creators stay connected to their followers, notice shifts in their behavior, and adapt to their preferences.
What Formula Should I Use? 🧮
It will depend on you, your platforms, and why you’re calculating your engagement. A quick Google search will show you a variety of options. But don’t get overwhelmed: you should have only a few on deck.
Average Engagement Rate
You can use this engagement rate for posts over a longer period. A week, a month, a quarter, even a year! This basic engagement rate formula is likes, comments, and shares divided by total followers. You can even add saves if you want. You’ll get the total number of likes, comments, shares, and saves over your desired time, then divide it by your followers. Written out, this looks like:
Likes + comments + shares + saves divided by followers.
Daily Engagement Rate
Calculating daily engagement is a little more tricky, but can be enlightening. This allows you to see how your profile performs on a single day. You’ll need the total number of engagements, which you can get by notifications or keeping track of where you began and ended. Written out, this looks like:
Total engagements in a day (likes + comments + shares + saves) divided by followers.
Post Engagement Rate
This rate is for individual posts. While the other two formulas give you an overall or average engagement rate, this one targets specific posts. This is a great formula for super analytical, detail-oriented creators. If you try something new, calculating the engagement rate can help you see if it was successful. It also gives you a better look at the actual engagement on your posts, so over-performing or under-performing one-offs don’t skew results. For this, you’d take the total engagements on a post and divide it by your followers. Written out, this looks like:
Likes + comments + shares + saves divided by followers.
How to Calculate Your Social Media Engagement Rate 📈
You don’t need fancy software or apps to calculate your social media engagement rate. You can use the calculator on your phone!
If you want to take your tracking extra seriously and really dive into the numbers, we recommend setting up a spreadsheet. You can enter all the components for your engagement rate and set it up to calculate it for you. Or, you can do it manually and just input the result. This helps you actually see which posts performed well and takes the abstract idea of a social media engagement rate and makes it real.
To help we’ve created a simple Google Sheet to get you started! There’s even a graph to help you chart your engagement over time. Click here to see the Sheet, then open the “File” menu in the top left. Tap “Copy to Drive”, rename your file, then hit “Make a Copy” to add it to your Google Drive and use it for your content strategy!
In Conclusion
As the industry grows and changes, keeping track of your social media engagement rate will help you develop effective strategies and keep track of your growth. Whether you’re looking to better understand your audience or hoping to land your dream partnership, your social media engagement rate will be an invaluable tool.
To learn more about social media engagement rates, check out this article from Keyhole and this write-up from Hootsuite.