The engagement rate on social media is an indicator that serves to determine the level of commitment and interaction that an audience or consumer has with published content. Below, learn more about this concept and how it is measured.
What is engagement?
The word engagement is an anglicism that means “commitment” in Spanish. In digital marketing, the word engagement is used to refer to the level of commitment that an audience has with a company’s content ; shared mainly through digital platforms such as websites, social networks, emails, or the time a person spends interacting on said platforms.
Engagement is not the same as engagement marketing . The latter is a marketing strategy that directly involves consumers, inviting them to participate in the evolution or experience of the brand.
Rather than viewing consumers as passive recipients of messages, engagement marketing views them as key players in the production and creation of marketing plans.
What is social media engagement rate?
The engagement rate on social networks , or interaction rate in Spanish, is an germany whatsapp number indicator expressed as a percentage that serves to quantify the level of interaction that an audience has with a publication or a set of publications.
This indicator is calculated by taking into account the number of interactions and actions that a post receives on social networks (likes, comments, shares, viewing time); and the number of followers, impressions or reach that the account has.
The engagement rate , depending on the established objectives, does not tell you, for example, if your return on investment (ROI) on social networks was high or low.
That is, it should not be considered as an indicator to know if the resources and time invested in implementing a social media marketing strategy, whose purpose, for example, is to generate sales, is generating economic benefits; it simply tells you how appreciated the content shared by consumers, prospects or clients was.
That's why, when it comes to brand positioning campaigns, engagement plays a leading role, as it allows you to know, through the number of likes, comments and shares, the receptivity of a published content; regardless of your company's sales.
A lot of likes and comments on an advertisement that drives traffic to an e-commerce site doesn't help you know if the advertisement is achieving the objectives you want; it simply tells you that the content of the advertisement is sparking interest in the audience.
To measure the effectiveness of an ad, there are more specific metrics such as the conversion rate, which indicates how many users or visitors to a website completed a goal or event, which, continuing with the example, could be “add to cart” or “buy.”
In this sense, the engagement rate is not effective, in this case, to know if there was a return on investment from the advertising campaign or to know the percentage of users converted into qualified leads or clients.
How to measure engagement rate on social media?
In the case of social media, there are different ways to measure an audience's engagement rate: by reach, by impressions, by number of followers, on a daily basis. You just have to change the variable in the denominator in the formula.
For example, to measure the engagement rate on social networks by reach, you must apply the following formula:
engagement-rate-by-reach-formula
Total engagement is the sum of likes, comments, and number of shares. If you want to measure engagement per post, replace “reach” with “number of followers.” Here’s what you can see:
engagement-rate-formula-per-followers
The engagement of the post in relation to the number of followers is 15.45%.
However, there are other types of interactions or metrics you can use to measure engagement outside of social media, such as website visits, newsletter subscribers, comments, and article likes.
Therefore, it is important that the interactions you choose to calculate the engagement rate depend on the channels, objectives and strategy you are implementing.
Types of interactions you can take into account: