How to Calculate Engagement Rate (Calculator)

Engagement metrics are the currency of the social media marketing industry.

Of course, vanity metrics like followers, likes, and impressions mean something. But engagement metrics like shares and comments provide insight into your social media performance.

This is why engagement rates are often used as a selling point in influencer marketing media kits or to evaluate the ROI of a social campaign. But there are several different ways to calculate.

What is engagement rate?

Engagement rate measures the number of interactions with social media content in relation to reach, followers, or audience size. Interactions can include reactions, likes, comments, shares, saves, direct messages, mentions, link clicks, and more (depending on the social network). There are several ways to measure engagement rates, and different calculations may better fit your social media goals.

Social media “engagement”usually refers to activities that are more active than passive (such as views or impressions).

Why track engagement?

When it comes to social media analytics, follower growth is important, but it doesn’t really matter if your audience doesn’t care about the content you post. You need comments, shares, likes and other actions that prove that your content resonates with the people who see it.

What metrics are considered engagement?

You can include all or some of these engagement metrics in your engagement rate equations:

• reactions
• like
• Comments
• stock
• saves
• Direct messages
• mentions (marked or not)
• cliques
• cliques
• profile visits
• answers
• retweets
• quote tweets
• programs
• clicks on links
• calls
• texts
• sticker taps (stories)
• emails
• Get directions (Instagram account only)
• use of branded hashtags

5 Methods for Calculating Engagement Rate

These are the most common formulas you will need to calculate your social media engagement rate.

1. Engagement Rate by Reach (ERR): most common

This formula is the most common way to calculate engagement with social media content.

ERR measures the percentage of people who choose to interact with your content after viewing it.

Use the first formula for a single post and the second one to calculate the average bid across multiple posts.

• ERR = total interactions per post / reach per post * 100

To determine the average, add up all the ERRs of the posts you want to average and divide by the number of posts:

• Average ERR = Total ERR / Total Posts

In other words: post 1 (3.4%) + post 2 (3.5%) / 2 = 3.45%

Pros: Reach can be a more accurate measurement than follower count since not all of your followers will see all of your content. And non-followers may have accessed your posts through reposts, hashtags, and other means.

Cons: Reach can fluctuate for various reasons, making it another variable to control. Very low reach can lead to disproportionately high levels of engagement, and vice versa, so be sure to keep that in mind.

2. Engagement Rate by Post (Post ER): Best for Specific Posts

Technically, this formula measures the engagement of subscribers in a particular post. In other words, it’s similar to ERR, except instead of reach, it tells you the rate at which subscribers are interacting with your content.

Most social media influencers calculate their average engagement rate this way.

• Post ER = Total number of interactions with the post / Total number of subscribers * 100

To calculate the average, add up all the ER posts you want to average and divide by the number of posts:

• Average ER per post = Total ER per post / Total number of posts

Example: post 1 (4.0%) + post 2 (3.0%) / 2 = 3.5%

Pros: While ERR is the best way to estimate engagement based on how many people have seen your post, this formula replaces follower reach, which is generally a more stable metric.

In other words, if your reach fluctuates frequently, use this method to more accurately measure post-post engagement.

Cons: As mentioned, while this can be a more reliable way to track post engagement, it doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story because it doesn’t take viral reach into account. And as your follower count increases, engagement rates may drop slightly.

Be sure to review these statistics along with subscriber growth analytics.

3. Engagement Rate by View (ER impressions): best for paid content

Another basic audience metric you can use to measure engagement is impressions. While reach measures how many people see your content, impressions track how often that content appears on screen.

• ER impressions = total post interactions / total impressions * 100
• Average ER Impressions = Total ER Impressions / Total Posts

Pros: This formula can be useful if you run paid content and need to measure performance based on impressions.

Cons: Engagement rate calculated with impressions as a base should be lower than ERR and ER in post-equations. Like reach, impression metrics can also fluctuate. It might be a good idea to use this method in conjunction with coverage.

Learn more about the difference between reach and impressions.

4. Daily Engagement (Daily ER): Best for long-term analysis.

While Engagement by Reach measures engagement versus maximum exposure, it’s still useful to have an idea of ​​how often your followers engage with your account on a daily basis.

• Daily ER = total daily engagements / total followers * 100
• Average Daily ER = X Days Total Engagements / (X Days * Followers) * 100

Pros: This formula is a good way to gauge how often your followers interact with your account on a daily basis, rather than how they interact with a particular post. As a result, it balances interaction with new and old messages.

This formula can also be adapted for specific use cases. For example, if your brand only wants to measure daily comments, you can set up “general engagement”accordingly.

Cons: There is a lot of room for errors in this method. For example, the formula does not take into account the fact that the same subscriber can engage 10 times per day, compared to 10 subscribers who engage once.

Daily commitments can also vary for a number of reasons, including the number of posts you share. For this reason, it might be worth comparing daily engagement with the number of posts.

5. View Engagement Rate (ER Views): Best for Video

If video is the main vertical for your brand, you’ll probably want to know how many people choose to interact with your videos after watching them.

• View ER = total video post interactions / total video views * 100
• Average ER Views = Total ER Views / Total Posts

Pros: If one of your video’s goals is to grab attention, this can be a good way to keep track of it.

Cons: View counts often include repeat views from the same user (non-unique views). While this viewer may view the video multiple times, they will not necessarily interact multiple times.

How to Calculate Interaction Cost: Best for Measuring Influencer Engagement

Another useful equation to add to your social media toolbox is cost per interaction (CPE). If you decide to sponsor content and engagement is a key goal, you need to know how much this investment pays off.

• CPE = total amount spent / total number of interactions

Most social media advertising platforms will do this calculation for you, along with other object-oriented calculations such as CPC. Be sure to check which interactions count as interactions to make sure you’re comparing apples to apples.

Free Engagement Rate Calculator

Now that you’ve covered all the formulas, are you ready to calculate your engagement rate? Try our free engagement rate calculator.

All you need to use this calculator is a Google Sheet. Click the “File”tab and select “Make a copy”to start filling in the fields.

To calculate the engagement rate of an individual post, enter “1”in “No. messages.”To calculate the engagement rate of multiple posts, enter the total number of posts in the No. messages.”

How to Calculate Engagement Rate Automatically

If you’re tired of manually calculating engagement rates, or you’re just not good at math (hey!), you might want to consider using a social media management tool like Hootsuite. This allows you to analyze your social media activity at a high level and get as much detail as you want with customizable reports.

Here’s an example of what your Hootsuite engagement data looks like:

And here is an example of how the Instagram engagement report looks in Hootsuite.

In addition to showing the overall engagement rate of posts, you can also see which types of posts are generating the most engagement (so you can increase them in the future) and even the number of people who have visited your site.

In both reports, it’s very easy to see how many interactions you’ve received in a given time period, what counts as an interaction for each network, and compare your engagement metrics to previous time periods.

Pro Tip: You can schedule these reports to be generated automatically and remind yourself to review as often as you want.

Try it free for 30 days

What is a good engagement rate?

Most social media marketing experts agree that a good engagement rate is between 1% and 5%. The more subscribers you have, the harder it is to achieve this.

Now that you know how to track your brand’s social media activity, learn how to increase your engagement rate.