What is Engagement Rate | How to Calculate It in 2024?

As a content creator, it is not enough that your audiences are viewing your posts. Your goal should be to create content that provides value to your customers, and one of the ways to know is through the engagement rate.

Social media engagement rate is a metric that provides valuable insight into consumers’ interaction with your content. In this article, you’ll discover what it is, how is engagement rate is calculated, and how to improve the engagement rate to accomplish your marketing goals.

Ensure you follow closely till the end.

What is Engagement Rate?

Engagement rate is a social media analytics metric that measures how people interact with any content you publish. The interaction is determined by likes, comments, shares, and other reactions to your posts on popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

However, other digital platforms like websites determine engagement rates by clicks, downloads, and time spent on the page. Also, numerous followers don’t always imply that your content is interesting and gives maximum value. This is true because followers can view your posts passively without active actions or reactions.

Furthermore, an account with fewer followers can have higher engagement if they get tons of likes, shares, and comments. As such, you need to know how to measure social media engagement because user engagement rate is the accurate indicator of the success of your marketing efforts.

Why is Engagement Rate Important?

Engagement rate sheds light on the quality of your content independent of your followers. Although the engagement rate formula factors in the number of your followers and reactions to your content.

Follower engagement gives you insight into your customers’ interests and preferences and how you can strategize where necessary. If you have many followers with little engagement rate, it may be that your follower base is not your target audience or you are not creating what they want.

That is why using tools like Mandala AI to curate content ideas for posts that interest your users will surely boost your engagement rate.

On the other hand, a high engagement rate on social media means your posts are catching the consumer’s attention and meeting their expectations.

Customers who connect with your value proposition will interact more with your content. Their interactions on your social media page make your brand even more visible, translating to more earnings for you.

Mandala AI Helps You Calculate the Engagement Rate Faster

Now that you understand the importance of content engagement, the next concern is how to calculate social media engagement rate. You must know that engagement metrics vary based on the social media platforms. Nonetheless, below is the general formula for engagement rate:

Engagement rate = (Total Engagement / Total Followers) x 100%

Where,
Total engagement = Sum of shares, likes, comments, clicks, and reactions (depending on the platform).
Total followers = all the accounts that directly follow you on the platform

For Facebook and LinkedIn, total engagements include clicks, likes, comments, shares, and follows. 

For Instagram, total engagements include likes, comments, and saves.

For YouTube, total engagements include subscriptions, views, likes, and dislikes.

TikTok’s total engagements include profile views, video views, comments, likes, shares, and saves.

For Twitter, total engagements include likes, usernames, reposts, replies, links, follows, cards, embedded media, profile photos, post-expansion, and hashtags.

On Instagram, a share doesn’t have as much significance as increasing likes and comments, while a share has greater relevance on Facebook. That’s why knowing what counts in each platform’s engagement rate calculations is imperative. Besides, it will help you understand how invested your audience is in your content.

Calculating engagement rates can be time-consuming and tedious, so many brands save time using tools like Mandala AI. Our software seamlessly tracks engagement rate statistics irrespective of the social media platform you’re actively engaging.

Benchmarks and Industry Standards

Engagement rate benchmarks are essential because they help you judge the level of your social media campaign’s success. They give you a better picture of the places to put more effort into experiencing engagement growth. Much more, industry standards ensure you set realistic expectations for your business.

According to Social Insider, below are different industry benchmarks and standards for engagement rate to measure your social engagement:

• TikTok: TikTok’s average engagement rate is 4.25 percent by followers and 5.10 percent by views. However, audience interaction on the platform steadily declines annually by 28 percent. 
• Instagram: Instagram has an average engagement rate of 0.6 percent, and reels generated more traffic than other content formats.
• Facebook: Facebook records an average audience interaction of 0.15 percent.
• Twitter: Twitter has the lowest average engagement rate of 0.05% across all industries. 

How to Improve Your Engagement Rate

The first step to boosting engagement is understanding the metrics influencing audience interaction with your content. Factors contributing to engagement rate optimization include:

1. Content quality

Beyond your brand’s size, consumers care more about the value you can offer them. Ensure that your content addresses your customers’ pain points and needs of your customers. Go the extra mile to determine what they want to ensure your brand is relevant to their expectations, interests, and preferences.

2. Timing

A more thoughtful posting schedule encourages better exposure and audience interaction with your content. Uploading often is not enough; putting out your content at the time of the day when your customers would most likely be online is essential. 

3. Audience targeting

You cannot engage an audience you do not understand. On that note, you must do your research to know those you are targeting to patronize your brand. When you recognize your target market, you will know what to publish, the brand voice to maintain, and the social media platforms to actively engage.

Additional engagement rate improvement tips

1. Be personal

Put in the effort to engage with your audience personally. Comment on their responses with warmth, start a conversation, and acknowledge their concerns. The recognition that there is a real person behind a brand encourages audience interaction.

2. Stay responsive

When you promptly respond to your customers, they feel valued, which leaves them more satisfied. Thoughtful and informative responses further fuel their loyalty to your brand. You can also start conversations to keep your users interested.

3. Do giveaways

Doing giveaways or running contests can skyrocket your audience’s interaction with your brand. This strategy creates excitement around your content when people win and share their stories with others.

Case studies

The knowledge of businesses that have worked to encourage customer engagement with their brand is inspiring. Reviewing these real-life stories proves you, too, can successfully boost your social media engagement rates. 

Here are the true stories of some businesses that significantly improved their audience engagement and how they did it.

1. Dove

Dove is a skincare brand that recorded massive engagements during their “Real Beauty Sketches’ campaign.” According to the brand’s strategy, a forensic artist was to listen to women describe themselves and make sketches according to their descriptions. Next, the artist would make another drawing of these women based on another person’s description of the women. 

The exercise results were two contrasting pictures of each woman, which described the difference in self-perception and beauty in the world. Many viewers could relate to the campaign, as it revealed people’s vulnerability while emphasizing Dove’s commitment to valuing real beauty. 

This campaign generated over 50 million views in 12 days after its launch, and the interaction with the media generated more brand engagement through this course.

2. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) Association

The ALS Association launched the Ice Bucket Challenge to raise awareness about the condition. It was a fun and participatory campaign involving people pouring a bucket of ice over their heads and calling others to replicate the same. The challenge went viral such that even celebrities joined in on the fun.

The result was an even greater engagement and awareness, which amounted to about 2.4 million tags on Facebook. The engagement strategy was a significant success because up to 17 million people took part in the challenge globally. Ultimately, the ALS funding raised $115 million to treat the condition.

boost your social media engagement rates

Every brand wants to understand how well its business is doing to thrive. Having a large followership is not enough because audience interaction reflects your content’s success.

Engagement rate tracking gives a wholesome performance measurement of your content so you can restrategize where necessary. Furthermore, the different ways to find engagement rates depend on your social media platform.

Among all engagement rate-boosting methods, Mandala AI stands apart as a free, fast, and simple way to increase engagement rates on social media. Our tool can analyze and compute your engagement rate across a wide range of platforms, all in one place.

Additionally, Mandala Analytics gives insight into your content, brand, and marketing campaign performance. As such, you can easily adjust where needed to boost your audience interaction, positively influencing your engagement rate. Explore Mandala AI’s SaaS products today to enjoy its 15-day free trial!