If your business publishes in social media, surely you have heard or read about “engagement”. Engagement refers to user interaction with your posts in social media and it is fairly easy to calculate with a simple formula. Here we will review the most common formula for calculating social media engagement in Facebook or Instagram.
Engagement Rate for Facebook:
A very simple way to calculate your post-level engagement is the following formula:
Total engagements per post / reach per post * 100 = Percent Engagement Rate
Generally, this is a fairly accurate estimate of your post’s engagement and it is superior to calculating engagement by dividing by your page’s followers as only a small percentage of your followers actually see your post. In the following example, we have a post that has reached 133 people and has had 15 engagements. So our engagement rate is:
15 / 133 x 100 = 11.27%
Although this is the preferred basic calculation for Facebook engagement, you can also calculate engagement by dividing the number of engagements by followers when you are doing a benchmark with competitor pages as you will likely not know the reach of their individual posts.
If you want to calculate your average engagement rate, you can download your post level data from Facebook for a given period of time and create formula that sums reactions, shares and comments and divides by reach. In general, most owned social media monitoring tools will also give you this calculation. If you use a tool, do check to be sure what formula they are using to calculate engagement.
Engagement Rate for Instagram
In the case of Instagram, it is more difficult to have access to reach numbers, especially if you do not have a business account or special tools at your disposal. For this reason, we generally use the formula that is based on followers. Again, this is an easy way to benchmark yourself against the Instagram profiles of your competition:
Total engagements per post / number of followers * 100 = Percent Engagement Rate
In Instagram, engagements are likes and comments. Let’s see an example:
Here we have a post from none other than Instagram. The post has been liked by 483,063 people and has 302 comments, and Instagram has 328,019,227 followers. So our calculation for engagement is:
Engagements (483,063 + 302) / Followers (328,019,277) x 100 = 0.15%
As you can see, calculating post-level engagement is quite simple. The logic of the formula applies to any social network that gives you reach, or if not reach, followers or impressions. If you want to learn more about social media KPIs, feel free to drop us a line!
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Managing Director
Andreas is Managing Director at All Around. He worked for years in leading roles and international projects at WPP and Publicis Group agencies. He now leads a multi-disciplinary team of marketing consultants from different disciplines, backgrounds and countries who have joined forces to deliver international digital strategies and measurable results for our clients.
