Calculating Engagement

Shot by Shout & Co. for Santosa. Shout & Co. Product Stylist & Social Media Strategist

So you're getting likes and comments stacking up on your posts which is great - but how do you know if it's great enough?  52 likes on a post is phenomenal if you have 100 followers, but not so phenomenal if you have 100,000.  Knowing how engaged your followers are is key to understanding whether or not your content is resonating with your audience.

Your engagement rate will tell you just that - and thankfully it's pretty easy to calculate.  Simply take the total number of likes / comments / reposts on any given post and divide that by the number of followers you have and multiply that by 100 to get a percentage. 

For example: if your post fetches 52 actions (likes / comments / reposts), and you have 384 followers:

52 / 384 * 100 = 13.5%

You can also do this for all of your posts combined: taking the average engagement across all of your content, dividing by the number of followers and multiplying by 100.  I prefer the individual post ER % because it gives you a snapshot of - post by post - what type of content fetches better engagement (i.e. if your behind the scenes posts get higher engagement than pics of your dogs, then you know the key to success lies with the former and posting less of the latter).  

Great.  Now you know you're ER %, but what about it?  13.5%: is that good? bad? ok?  

In general, Facebook & Twitter's average engagement rate is 0.5% - 1% 
Instagram's baseline ER is between 3% and 6%
LOW ER: 0% - 1.64%
GOOD ER: 1.65% - 3.48%
GREAT ER: 3.49% - 6.67%
OUT OF THIS WORLD ER: 6.68% +

So an engagement rate of 13.5% as per the above example means you're absolutely KILLING it.  Go you!  Having a good ER means that there's room for improvement and a bit of work to do to realign your content with what your audience really wants to see.

Are you sitting with a low engagement rate?  If so, sorry to break it to ya, but there's a content misfire happening there somewhere - let's figure out what's going wrong.  Get in touch with us and we'll work together to knock your ER% out of the ballpark: info@shoutandco.com.  

In next week's Journal, Ill be sharing with you some facts, info and tips on follower growth and how to measure success.