Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is a marketing metric that shows how actually involved your audience is with your content.
The main parts that comprise engagement all revolve around some form of interaction — commenting, liking, sharing, saving, DMing, how far down a page was scrolled, and so on. A number of these interactions is then pitted against the number of followers, visitors, or views you have (depending on the platform) to determine the final engagement rate numbers.
Engagement rate is used to gauge the impact marketing campaigns have on your brand awareness. Getting people to interact with your content in some way increases the chances of their conversion into a paying customer.
Why Engagement Rate is important
Engagement rate is the perfect metric to measure how your marketing efforts are going. It also allows your team to understand if they're producing the right kind of content for your target audience.
In social media context, maintaining high engagement rates leads to better consumer relations, builds credibility, and raises brand awareness. Beyond that, high engagement rates has a knock-off effect of boosting word-of-mouth marketing.
How Engagment Rate is calculated
Due to the definition of "engaged user" being ever-so-slightly different for each social platform and website, there's no singular formula for engagement rate calculations. Below is a small overview of factors going into engagement rate calculations:
- For most social media, it is likes/reactions, shares, and replies;
- For Instagram, it is post likes, comments, and saves;
- For Facebook, it is post reactions, comments, shares, and clicks;
- For YouTube, it is video views, viewing time, like ratio, and comments;
- For emails, it is open rates and click-through rates;
- For websites, it is time spent on a page, average page views, scroll depth, form conversions, etc.
What is a good Engagement Rate?
The most commonly accepted breakdown goes like the following:
- <1% — low engagement rate;
- 1% to 3,5% — average engagement rate;
- 3,5% to 6% — high engagement rate;
- >6% — extremely high engagement rate.
Keep in mind that these numbers are not absolute as engagement rate is never truly fixed, so take them more as guiding points. Naturally, the more followers/visitors you have, the more effort is required to achieve and maintain higher engagement numbers.
How to improve Engagement Rate
While praying for active userbase is a decent start, chances are you'll need to put some work into improving your engagement rate. Here're a few steps you can use to hit the ground running:
- Start actively monitoring the numbers that go into engagement rate calculation for your platform of choice
- Once you know the average number of visits/views, comments, likes, and so on, start experimenting with your content to see how the numbers shift. The experiments to try include, but not limited to, adjusting your language and vocabulary, tinkering on structure, trying out different formatting options, or switching form factor altogether (e.g. going from text to image content);
- Consistently making note of the changes to your metrics will, over time, give you valuable clues as to what sticks well with your audience and what is best left behind.