How to Calculate Your Social Media Engagement Rate (And Why It Matters)

Tracking your social media engagement rate is one of the best ways to gauge how well your content resonates with your audience

But what exactly is engagement rate and how do you calculate it?

In this comprehensive guide we’ll cover everything you need to know about measuring engagement on social media. including

• What engagement rate is
• Why it’s important for your social strategy
• The different formulas for calculating it
• Tips for improving your engagement

Let’s dive in!

What Is Engagement Rate?

Your social media engagement rate is the percentage of people who interact with your content after seeing it. It shows how much your audience cares about the posts you share.

Engagement metrics like likes, comments, shares, and more indicate your content strikes a chord with your followers. Higher engagement rates also help you get better visibility in social feeds and look more credible to visitors.

For most accounts, a good engagement rate benchmark is between 1-5%. But the larger your following, the harder it gets to hit those high percentages.

Why Track Engagement Rate?

Measuring engagement rate is crucial for a few reasons:

It shows content performance

The number of people who took time to interact with your post shows how interesting or useful it was. Posts with higher engagement are clearly resonating with your audience.

It surfaces your best content

Looking at engagement rates helps you identify your top-performing content. You can then reuse those formats, topics, and styles in future posts.

It provides audience insights

Analyzing comments and replies gives you free market research! You can discover pain points, learn what followers like about your brand, and identify new opportunities.

It helps benchmark performance

Comparing engagement rates over time shows whether your social strategy is improving. You can also benchmark against competitors.

Clearly, monitoring engagement is critical for informing your social media approach and creating content people love.

How to Calculate Engagement Rate

Figuring out your engagement rate is simple with the right formulas. Let’s look at the most common ways to calculate it on social media.

By Reach

This formula measures the percentage of users who interacted after seeing your post. It’s the most popular method for calculating engagement rate.

Formula:
Total Engagements / Reach x 100

Example:

• You post a photo which gets 50 likes, 20 comments and 10 shares
• The post reached 500 people
• Your engagement rate is: (50 + 20 + 10) / 500 x 100 = 16%

This approach is handy because reach better reflects the size of the audience exposed to the post vs. just total followers.

By Impressions

This method measures engagement rate based on impressions or views rather than reach. It works well for paid social media advertising.

Formula:
Total engagements / Impressions x 100

Example:

• Your sponsored post got 300 impressions
• It received 40 likes and 10 comments
• Your engagement rate is: (40 + 10) / 300 x 100 = 16.7%

However, impression figures can vary a lot and lead to inconsistent results. Use this metric carefully.

By Followers

This calculates your engagement rate compared to total followers. Many influencers use this method to determine their average rate per post.

Formula:
Total engagements / Total followers x 100

Example:

• You have 10,000 followers
• A post got 400 likes and 100 comments
• Your engagement rate is: (400 + 100) / 10,000 x 100 = 5%

This approach provides a stable measure of engagement. But it doesn’t account for reach beyond your existing follower base.

Daily Engagement

This metric shows how often followers engage daily rather than per post. You can tailor it, for example by tracking only daily comments.

Formula:
Daily engagements / Total followers x 100

Example:

• You have 5,000 followers
• You got 250 engagements yesterday
• Your daily engagement rate is: 250 / 5,000 x 100 = 5%

This method has limitations though. A single user can engage multiple times, skewing daily totals.

Tips to Improve Engagement

Once you know how to calculate engagement rate, you can work on boosting it. Here are some proven ways to get more likes, comments, and shares on social media.

• Post at optimal times. Analyze when your followers are most active online and schedule content accordingly.

• Use visual content. Posts with images and video tend to have higher engagement across social platforms.

• Try new formats. Leverage different content types like Stories, Reels, and Live Video.

• Respond to comments. Being social and replying to user feedback shows you care.

• Run contests and giveaways. These tactics entice users to like, share, and comment to win prizes.

• Ask questions. Posting questions is a simple way to spark more comments and discussion.

• Engage influencers. Getting influencers to share or react to your content can help boost visibility.

• Improve copywriting. Craft captions and posts that inform, entertain, inspire or resonate emotionally.

• Refine hashtags. Include a mix of popular and niche hashtags to extend reach and interactions.

Test out these tips, analyze the results, and double down on what drives the highest engagement for your brand.

Measuring Engagement Automatically

Manually calculating engagement for all your social accounts is tedious. The easier option is using a social media management platform like Hootsuite to do the work for you.

Hootsuite pulls detailed analytics from all your connected social networks into one dashboard. You can easily view engagement rates by post, account, network and time period.

The tool also displays your:

• Top engaging posts
• Best times to post
• Engagement trends over time
• Engagement benchmarks vs competitors

With these insights, you can directly apply what boosts performance across all your social profiles. Hootsuite makes enhancing your engagement rate simple and straightforward.

Let’s Recap

• Engagement rate shows how interested your audience is in your social content, which is critical for improving your strategy.

• The most common formula is engagements divided by reach, but you can also calculate it based on impressions, followers, views or daily.

• Aim for engagement rates between 1-5%, but the more followers you have, the harder it gets.

• Boosting engagement requires testing different posting times, visual content, formats, copywriting, hashtags and more.

• Use a tool like Hootsuite to automatically track engagement across all your accounts and simplify reporting.

Focusing on engagement rate will keep you laser targeted on creating content your followers genuinely care about. So start measuring, experiment and improve engagement today!