Calculate and Improve your Social Media Engagement Rate

Engagement, what comes to your mind when you hear that word? It's almost impossible to think of it without thinking of marriage. When it comes to your brand or personal social media presence, you need not only make the audience you are targeting fall in love with you, but you also want that relationship to be strong and long lasting. In order to keep that level of engagement, you should keep track of your account's engagement rate, so you can tackle early problems that indicate your relationship is beggining to decline.

Here is how to do it.

How to calculate your social media account engagement rate

When we talk about engagement, we are not only talking about likes, comments and shares. It is essential to have good engagement rates that indicate how much your audience interacts with your content and if they see it as valuable or not.

Social networks are nothing more than tools that facilitate interactions between people. Whether you are an influencer or a brand, the exchange with your audience must be true and consistent, otherwise, if your engagement shoots down its a sign that your audience is losing their interest and your content is likely to loose traction.

But what exactly is the engagement rate?

The engagement rate represents the level of user interaction reached by a post or page. This includes reactions, shares, comments, clicks and more. However, keep in mind that engagement and engagement rate are two different things.

Engagement is the thermometer that shows if your publications are pleasing, accounting for the reactions of the followers such as the number of likes, comments and shares.

Engagement rate, on the other hand, is a metric that measures the audience engagement with your posts or your page. By calculating the engagement rate, you can see which posts are resonating with your audience and which ones are not. The engagement rate is calculated by dividing the total number of engagements (likes, comments, and shares) by the number of impressions.

For example, if you had a post that received 100 likes, 10 comments, and 5 shares, and the post had 10,000 impressions, the engagement rate would be:

115 / 10,000 = 1%

This means that 1% of the people who saw the post interacted with it. While there is no such thing as an objective when talking about engagement rate, you should aim at least to score higher than 1%. The higher the engagement rate, the more effective your content is at resonating with your audience and the most likely to be percieved as valuable by them, therefor, the later won't be looking for content somewhere else.

How to keep your followers engaged?

In ordre to keep a long lasting 'marriage' with your followers you must keep them entertained and interested for as long as you can. This is why it is so important to bring them value, teach them something or to interact with them as much as possible and the way to do this may vary from account to account, but you can always use some known techniques which include the use of image or video to help capture people's attention, the use of infographics to bring relevant information and data to the follower and the use of audio to give a coherent tone to your content.

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