How to Calculate Social Media Engagement Rates

Do you use social media to interact with customers but have no idea how to measure your success? You’re not alone: many marketing professionals struggle to understand social media engagement rates.

Social media usage among B2B buyers is significant since 84% say they turn to social media when making a purchase decision. This, in itself, makes it essential for companies to track social media engagement rates and prioritize increasing them.

The good news, however, is that you can measure your social media engagement rate and see the ROI of your efforts with just a few simple steps! In this blog post, I’ll explain exactly what an engagement rate is and share the average rates for each social media platform. We’ll also look at how you can calculate your own engagement rates!

What is the engagement rate?

The engagement rate is a metric that measures the performance of your social media channels. It is based on the number of interactions users have with your content, for example: likes, comments e shares.

Knowing your engagement rate helps you understand how actively users are interacting with your posts and can give you valuable insight into which content resonates most with your followers.

The engagement rate is one of the most important KPIs to monitor when it comes to social media, as it has a direct impact on conversion rates.

Your engagement rate is influenced by a variety of factors, including but not limited to:

• Posting times/frequency
• Format
• Platform
• Audience size
• Locations
• Demographics

Engagement rates also differ depending on whether you’re driving traffic organically or through paid campaigns. Organic campaigns are often slower to see results and may have lower engagement rates, while paid campaigns usually generate quicker results and potentially have higher engagement rates.

All businesses should aim to increase engagement rates over time, whether through organic or paid traffic, as this can boost sales, brand awareness, and followers.

Average engagement rates on social media

Knowing the average engagement rate for each social media platform is key to understanding how well you’re doing by comparison.

Across all industries, the average engagement rates are as follows (per follower):

• TikTok: the average engagement rate across all industries is 5.96%
• Facebook: the average engagement rate across all industries is 0.13%
• Instagram: the average engagement rate across all industries is 0.83%
• Twitter: the average engagement rate across all sectors is 0.05%

As a result of the short-form trend, TikTok easily leads the rankings with engagement rates over five times higher than Instagram.LinkedIn, although not mentioned in the previous report, was the most popular platform among B2B marketers and, according to a recent social report, offers one of the highest conversion rates of any social platform and some of the highest engagement levels. In fact, LinkedIn received 96.2% of all comments on B2B company advocacy social posts in 2021.

It’s important to remember that these are only averages: your engagement rates may be lower or higher depending on many factors. Always measure performance using your own goals and data, not just by comparing yourself to industry averages.

Various tools like Oktopost can also help you maintain higher engagement rates. Regular and consistent posting is one of the most important factors when it comes to engagement rates. You can schedule your posts to ensure your content is delivered at the right time and frequency.

How to measure social media engagement rates

Measuring social media engagement rates for a B2B company is important, as it can provide useful insights into which content works best for your target audience and which platforms you should focus your efforts on.

To get started, you should calculate your current engagement rate. There are several ways total engagement is calculated depending on the platform. An example might be:

• Instagram, total engagement would include Likes and comments
• Facebook, engagement is measured based on Likes, comments, and shares

If you are active on multiple social media platforms, the best way is to calculate the engagement rate for each one separately, as each platform may have different rates.

Let’s use Facebook as an example and show how you can calculate the engagement rate for the past seven days:

• Divide your total engagement from the last seven days by your total followers and multiply it by 100 to get your current engagement rate.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

Using the total Likes, shares, and comments from the last seven days, each company’s engagement rate is as follows:

• Company 1: 5,342 + 134 + 11,604 (total engagement) divided by 540,943 (total followers) x 100 (multiplied by 100) = 3.1% engagement rate
• Company 2: 450 + 96 + 2,933 (total engagement) divided by 35,423 (total followers) x 100 (multiplied by 100) = 9.8% engagement rate

To keep track of results and ensure you improve over time, you should repeat this calculation monthly. This will give you a good snapshot of how your social media posts are performing and whether they are resonating with your target audience.

Once you have an idea of your current engagement rate, you can start setting goals and objectives to improve it. To do this, you should focus on two key areas: content creation and audience growth.