Social media marketing relies heavily on engagement rates.

Indeed, easy-to-report metrics like impressions, likes, and followers give marketers a sense of accomplishment. However, engagement metrics such as comments, mentions, and shares are what actually demonstrate the success or failure of your social media marketing campaigns.

The odd thing is that there isn’t a standard formula to calculate engagement rate, despite how crucial it is.

This article will define engagement rate, explain why you should monitor it, and give you 6 accurate formulas to calculate it correctly.

What is engagement rate?

A measurement called engagement rate keeps track of how many interactions each follower on social media receives from your content.

The term “engagement” on social media typically refers to interactive rather than passive interactions like views and impressions. Depending on the social media platform you use, engagement can take the form of likes, shares, and comments, DMs, mentions, saves, click-throughs, etc.

To evaluate the efficacy and effectiveness of brand campaigns, engagement rate is used. This is because users who engage with your content through images, blogs, and videos are more likely to become customers than users who simply scroll through it.

There are numerous methods for calculating engagement rate, and various formulas might be more appropriate for your social media goals.

Why should you track engagement rate?

Many businesses define growth as an increase in social media followers. While this is true, if your followers don’t engage with or enjoy the content you post, an increase in followers won’t help your business much. You require shares, likes, comments, and other actions from your audience that demonstrate how well your content is being received.

You should monitor engagement rate because of this. Your engagement rate lets you know whether or not your audience finds your content interesting, useful, and relevant. If your followers are taking the time to leave comments and share your content, they are likely to be satisfied with your writing and eventually purchase your goods.

Some common engagement metrics

We made suggestions about behaviors that constitute engagement in the preceding sections. However, a comprehensive list of these behaviors that demonstrate how your followers are engaging with your content is provided below. Your equations can take into account some or all of these interactions.

• Likes
• Reactions
• Comments
• Shares
• Direct Messages (DMs)
• Post saves
• Mentions (tagged and untagged)
• Profile visits
• Replies
• Clicks
• Click-throughs
• Link clicks
• Quote tweets
• Retweets
• Regrams
• Emails
• Calls
• Texts (WhatsApp or SMS)
• Use of branded hashtags
• Get Directions (only for Instagram accounts)
• Sticker Taps (Instagram Stories)

Here are six formulas to determine engagement rate.

Here are the most popular equations you should be familiar with when figuring out your social media engagement rates.

• Engagement rate by reach (ERR)

The method used to determine engagement rate most frequently is engagement rate by reach (ERR). The amount of users who engaged with your content after viewing it is measured.

The following formula can be used to determine the ERR for one post:

ERR = Reach per post x 100 x Total engagements per post

Use this formula to determine the average ERR across multiple posts:

Post 1 (ERR) + Post 2 (ERR) +… + Post N (ERR) = Average ERR / N x 100

The appearance will be similar to this: 2.8% for Post 1, 3.3% for Post 2, and so forth.

Because not all of your followers will view your content, Engagement Rate by Reach (ERR) is a more accurate way to determine engagement rate than follower count. Additionally, through hashtags, shares, and other promotion techniques, your content can still be seen by those who are not following you.

Reach, however, varies for a variety of reasons, making it a challenging variable to manage. Extremely high engagement rates for brands with smaller audiences may not be an accurate representation of their actual interactions.

• Engagement rate by posts (ER post)

This equation calculates how many people have engaged with a particular post of yours. In contrast to ERR, this formula tells you the frequency with which your own followers engage with your content.

How to determine your ER post is as follows:

ER Post is calculated as follows: Total engagements per post / 100 followers.

Add up all the ER posts and divide by the total number of posts to determine the average ER post. For example:

The formula for average ER by post = (ER Post 1 + ER Post 2 +… + ER Post N) / N.

It will appear as follows: Posts 1 (3.5%), 2 (3.2%), and 3 (3.8%) divided by 3 result in 3.5%.

Although ERR is a more accurate way to gauge engagement based on the number of times your content has been viewed, this formula substitutes reach with followers, which is a more reliable metric to monitor. Use this formula to calculate your post engagement accurately if your reach varies significantly.

However, since viral reach is not taken into account in this formula, you won’t get a complete picture of how well your posts are actually performing. As your following grows, your engagement rate may also slightly decline.

ER by post cannot assist you in figuring out what issues your audience is facing or how to address them. Consequently, you should combine this formula with other growth metrics. For instance, less visible interactions like shares and saves may be more valuable than interactions like comments on Instagram posts (depending on your advertising goals).

• Engagement rate by impressions (ER impressions)

ERR counts the number of times people view your social media content, whereas ER by impressions counts the frequency with which it appears on users’ screens.

How to determine ER impressions is as follows:

ER impressions = All interactions per post / all impressions x 100

Average ER impressions = [Post 1 (ER impressions) + Post 2 (ER impressions) + … + Post N (ER impressions)] / N

If you run paid content and want to gauge the success of your paid campaign based on impressions, this formula works great.

This equation’s drawback is that ER impressions will demonstrate lower levels of engagement than ERR and ER post equations. Impressions can be inconsistent, just like reach. So, if you’re using this formula, combine it with other methods to get more precise results.

A word of advice: Reach differs from impressions. Reach is the total number of people who have seen your post, whereas impressions are the total number of times your content has been viewed. Your reach is 200 if 200 people saw your advertisement. Your impressions would be 400 if each of those individuals saw your advertisement twice.

• Daily engagement rate (Daily ER)

You should still be aware of how frequently your followers interact with your content each day since ERR compares engagement to your total exposure.

How to determine your daily engagement rate (daily ER) is given below:

Daily ER = All engagements per day / total number of followers x 100

Average Daily ER = (Daily ER 1 + Daily ER 2 + … + Daily ER N) / N

This formula is excellent for determining daily brand engagement rates as opposed to engagement rates for specific posts. Therefore, it considers the interactions on both old and new posts.

Additionally, you can adjust your Daily ER based on particular factors like shares or comments.

This formula’s drawback is that it is susceptible to error. It doesn’t take into account the fact that one follower may leave five comments on one of your posts in a single day, as opposed to five followers leaving one comment each.

The number of posts you publish each day can also affect how many people engage with you each day. Because of this, you should relate your daily ER to the quantity of posts you have.

• Views-to-engagement ratio (ER view)

If your primary content format is video, you must understand how many viewers interact with your videos after they have been watched.

The formula for ER view is as follows:

ER view = Total engagements / Total views x 100

Average ER view = (ER view 1 + ER view 2 + … + ER view N) / N

This formula can assist you in tracking engagement if that is one of your objectives for your videos. Repeat views are not taken into account by this formula, though. Therefore, your ER view will decrease if someone watches your videos more than once but doesn’t interact with them each time (with likes, comments, shares, etc.).

Pro tip: If you publish content on YouTube, you can use a free plugin to determine how much engagement your channel is receiving, such as Keywords Everywhere.

• Factored Engagement Rate

Certain engagement indicators of a post are more or less valuable when factored engagement rates are used. A social media marketer gives some engagement indicators a numerical value rather than simply counting each one once.

For instance, the marketer might decide to give shares more importance than likes. Each share can be weighed as two instead of one (for likes). This engagement rate’s calculation would be done using the following equation:

Share-weighted ER = (Total shares x 2) + all the other engagements / reach per post multiplied by 100

As the resulting engagement rate is inflated by this formula, it may be misleading. Because of this, we don’t suggest that you use it.

How to figure out the cost per engagement

Calculating your engagement rate will help you determine the caliber of your content, how your brand compares to that of your rivals, and whether or not your paid advertisements and sponsored content are yielding positive results.

Knowing your cost per engagement will help you determine whether you are making good use of your funds (CPE).

CPE is calculated using the following equation:

CPE = Total Amount Spent / Total Engagements.

This and other cost calculations, such as cost-per-click, are actually done for you by the majority of social media advertising platforms.

Using a calculator, you can quickly and easily determine your engagement rate. Google Sheets is all you need. To begin entering numbers into the fields, click File and choose Make a copy.

Example: Enter “1” in the No. of Posts field to calculate the engagement rate of one post. Enter the total number of posts in the No. of Posts tab to determine the engagement rate for a series of posts.

How to automatically monitor your engagement rate

It takes a lot of effort and time to manually calculate your engagement rate. Use a social media analytics and management tool if you want to go the easy route. This is an example of how a cross-platform engagement report appears:

Here is an instance of report that shows Instagram engagement rate.

Both reports make it simple to see how many engagements you received over the course of a reporting period, the engagement indicator is tracking for each network, and to compare your current engagement rates to those from earlier reporting periods.

Additionally, you’ll be able to see which posts did well over time and use that information to produce posts in the future that are even more successful. Additionally, you can configure your reports to generate themselves automatically.

What is a good engagement rate?

Your follower count, the type of content you post, and your marketing goals are just a few factors that affect your engagement rate. However, according to the majority of social media marketing experts, the ideal engagement rate is between 1% and 5%.

You must compare your engagement rate to something else in order to decide whether it is good or bad. You could, for instance, assess your social media performance against that of your rivals or across various social media platforms (your own social profiles).