What is an engagement rate?
The engagement rate refers to the level of interaction users have with a particular piece of content. Monitoring your engagement rate shows you how well your content resonates with your target audience and how effectively it captures their attention and encourages them to take action.
Engagement rates vary depending on the specific platform or metric being analyzed.
- Social Media: Engagement rates on socials include likes, comments, shares, and clicks on a post relative to the number of followers or impressions.
- Website: For websites, engagement rate may include metrics like the number of page views, time spent on a page, bounce rate, or conversion.
- Email: In email marketing, engagement rate measures factors like open rate, click-through rate (CTR), and unsubscribe rate.
A high engagement rate signifies that your content fosters meaningful interactions, essential for effective content marketing strategies.
Why is monitoring your engagement rate so important?
Monitoring your engagement provides valuable insight into content performance, helps you understand your audience’s preferences, and helps you track the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Monitoring your social media engagement can help you decide which social media mediums are best for selling, best for brand awareness, and best for the community.
When engagement is low, something needs to change, whether the content itself, the time of day you’re posting, or your target demographic. And low rates can also provide a clue into those brands who purchased followers rather than earned them over time. For investors, a company will need to illustrate a sincere and impressive engagement rate, so it’s usually a priority for many marketers in this field.
How to calculate the engagement rate
Determining your engagement varies across your content distribution channels.
Social Media
The formula for social media is simple: Divide the number of interactions by the total number of followers on the social media channel, then divide that by the total number of posts you want to measure.
Engagement Rate = ((Total Engagements / Total Followers) * 100) / Total Posts
For example, if you had a total of 500 likes, 100 comments, and 50 shares on your posts, you made a total of 20 posts, and you have 10,000 followers, the calculations would look like this:
Engagement Rate = (((500 + 100 + 50) / 10,000) * 100) / 20 = 3.25%
This means that the engagement rate for your social media platform during the selected number of posts is 3.25%.
The total engagement will thus change depending on what marketing channel you’re measuring. Some mediums, like TikTok, have shares, views, and comments to tally. Others only have likes and comments. Each social media channel will measure differently and, thus, require varying tactics.
Website/Email
To calculate the engagement rate for a website or email campaign, you will first want to determine the metrics you want to measure that align with your goals.
Some commonly used metrics include:
- Page Views
- Time on Page
- Bounce Rate
- Click-through Rate (CTR)
- Conversion Rate
- Unsubscribe Rate
Choose a specific time period for which you want to calculate your rate. It could be daily, weekly, monthly, or any other period that makes sense for your analysis. Once you have your selected metrics and time frame, you can calculate it using the following formula:
Engagement Rate = (Total Engagements / Total Sessions) * 100
For example, if you had a total of 10,000 page views, visitors spent a total of 2,000 minutes on your website, and you had 500 clicks on a specific call-to-action, and the total sessions during the selected time frame were 20,000, the calculations would look like this:
Engagement Rate = ((10,000 + 2,000 + 500) / 20,000) * 100 = 61.25%
This means that the engagement rate for your website during the selected time frame is 61.25%.
Common uses for engagement rate
- To understand the success of a campaign or post
- To gain insight into what resonates with followers and the overall audience
- To better provide the right type of content that aligns with brand goals
- To help grow sales, customer appreciation, community, and loyalty
- To analyze the right timing for posts
- To strategize content per social media channels
How to improve an engagement rate
For those struggling to determine what their audience needs and wants from a brand, there are many ways to test the waters and see what sticks.
A few ideas include:
- Switching up the time of day you post content on various social media platforms
- Spice up the type of content you post, varying from text and photos to videos
- A/B Test your caption lengths and headlines
- Test the waters with authentic, candid stories to personalize your content
- Create a contest or giveaway
- Partner with another company
- Actively encourage your audience to leave comments, ask questions, and share their thoughts
- Continuously analyze your engagement metrics to identify patterns and trends
One of the best ways to boost your engagement rate is by creating valuable, informative, and relevant content that addresses your audience’s needs and interests. Let our team at ClearVoice help you build a marketing strategy that supercharges your engagement. Talk to a content specialist today to get started.
