How to calculate engagement rate on Social Media can be surprisingly difficult to do. Should “engagement” include the number of times your post was saved? And what about the impressions vs followers debate? Which gives you a better overall understanding of your account’s health?

For every content put up in a social media platform, the account owner expects engagement, which could be in likes, shares, comments, views, etc. But then, if you want an accurate result of how well your posts are doing, you’ll need to calculate the engagement rate.

Calculating the engagement rate is something businesses use to check if their social media strategies are yielding any positive result. There are different ways to calculate the social media engagement rate, but the key to getting a perfect result is remaining consistent with your chosen formula.

You are going to see some formulas and how to apply some of them on your social media handles. Choose the one that fits your objectives while you can test others for comparison.

Different methods to calculate social media engagement rate

Here are some of the known formulas:

Post engagement rate

This formula uses followers to gauge the engagement rate. Here you will have to divide the total engagement in a post and divide it by the total of followers you have and multiply by 100.

Using this formula helps to get a more stable view of your social engagements since it would be rare for lots of people to unfollow you in a blink of an eye. However, if you want to know how viral your engagements are, consider using another formula.

Daily engagement rate

As the name suggests, it calculates the engagement rate on your social media platform per day. It helps to know if your followers engage with the contents you put out daily. It could help you decide whether to reduce daily posts or increase it.

To calculate using this formula, divide the total engagement in a day by the number of followers and multiply by 100. Note that you are calculating all the posts you put out daily and not a specific post.

Reach engagement rate

This formula calculates the number of people that interacted with your posts aside from your followers. It is helpful when trying to know the virality of a post.

To calculate engagement using this formula, divide the total engagement of a post with the reach and multiply by 100. Most content marketers use this formula because it accommodates both followers and non-followers.

Impression engagement rate

This formula calculates the engagement rate of a post through impressions. Impressions refer to how many times a post appears on people’s feed. To calculate with this formula, divide the total engagement on a post with the overall impression and multiply by 100.

It’s best to use this formula if you are using a campaign ad because it helps you track the effectiveness of the commercial and it’s potential to reach lots of people.

If you want to get an accurate engagement result when using campaign ads, you should try using the reach engagement rate along with the impression engagement rate.

View engagement rate

This formula deals with video content. Knowing how tasking it is to put out a quality video for your followers to engage, you would want to know if your efforts get rewards or if you need to map another strategy.

Also, some of your followers might only view the videos, but do not click the like, share or comment button. So, using this formula helps to track the rate of engagement.

This formula requires you to divide the total engagements on the video post by the full video views then divide by 100. The downside about using this formula is that it could give incorrect results as a person may view the video content multiple times but would comment once or not at all.

Inflated engagement rates

Some influencers and marketers, for some reason known to them, might decide to inflate an aspect of post engagement before adding it to others. They can choose to multiply the comments by two before adding it to the likes or views.

For example, a like-inflated engagement rate could look like this:

Total likes x 2 + other engagements/ reach per post x 100

Using this formula is outrightly misleading and can never give you an accurate result of the engagement rate of your social media accounts. If you’ve hired a content marketer, ensure they are not using it.

Cost per Engagement

If you’ve sponsored content, it’s crucial to know if it’s making headway or not and that’s why you need to calculate the cost per engagement. To make this calculation, divide the total amount spent by the overall engagement on the post.

Specific engagement rate calculation of social media platforms

Facebook Engagement Rate

When we talk about the engagement on Facebook, we are referring to likes, reactions, comments, shares, and clicking on images, videos, links.

To calculate the engagement rate for a Facebook post, you’ll need to calculate the:

Number of engaged users/ total reach of the post x 100

Multiplying by 100 is for the sake of turning it into a percentage. You can calculate the engagements per day or month.

Twitter Engagement Rate

To calculate the engagement rate on Twitter, you need to use the total likes, comments, and followers. For a twitter post, you’ll add the total likes of a tweet to the number of comments on the tweet. Then you divide your answer by the number of followers and multiply by 100 to get a percentage.

Total likes + comments/total followers x 100

The engagement rate for Instagram

The calculation for the engagement rate on Instagram is the same as twitter. Follow the step above.

LinkedIn Engagement Rate

To calculate the engagement rate of a LinkedIn post, you can use any formula as long as you remain consistent with it. One method for calculation is adding the number of likes, shares, comments, mentions, and clicks. Divide it by the reach of the post and multiply by 100.

Likes + comments + shares + mentions + clicks/ reach x 100

Learn how to calculate your engagement rates so that you know the next strategy to use for improving your content and probably boosting your engagement rates if you feel they are too low. And remember to stick to one or two formulas, so you don’t get confused or use incorrect results to gauge your content’s performance.