Engagement Rate useful?
What do we use engagement rate for? It gives us a more accurate view of content performance. Therefore if you want to know if your followers find your content useful then calculate your engagement rate. It works better than just looking at absolute numbers like clicks, likes, posting rate etc.
What is engagement rate?
Simply put, engagement rate is “total engagement divided by total followers, multiplied by 100”
Note that it is possible to have a low number of followers but have a higher engagement rate compared to bigger accounts. I prefer to grow steadily from this position compared to concentrating on obtaining a huge number of followers without having a clue what content they enjoy the most.
The best option to measure engagement rate is to have a social media management system. Aligned with obtaining a good social media management system is the importance of having a social media analyst capable of using the system. Easier said than done I can tell you.
A good action plan:
- Develop your own company norms for engagement rate per social media channel, organic and paid.
- Discover what each social channel suggests for good engagement rates both paid and organic.
- Develop your own company norms for engagement rate per social media channel. Publish internally a minimum and preferred rate for your company both organic and paid.
- Build custom metrics into your social media management system with the format for engagement rate that you prefer as a company, if possible, make it perform across a range of platforms.
How does it change for each platform?
The rate changes depending on the social media platforms used. So if you were only looking at say Instagram, you should use the total engagement as the total amount of likes and comments, plus any other future metric they may add that can be measured and aligns as engagement.
For Facebook it is different. Total engagement on Facebook would be the total amount of shares, likes, reactions, and comments.
What about clicks?
In my career the topic of adding clicks often comes up. In the end in the two major companies I have worked for both opted to add clicks. It is a matter for you to decide. Benchmarking is a key consideration. If you want to compare with other 3rd party results you must use the same formula as them. This is easier said than done to discover what was used by the way 😉
In conclusion
What is best to concentrate on a s a community manager or social media manager when it comes getting the balance right. Over more than ten years of training staff and agencies I have come to the conclusion that it is a balancing act between output frequency and quality. Yes you do not want to post much more than the norm expected in your topic area, and you do not want to post less. I have had tweets sent to my community managers on the odd occasion complaining that our accounts were tweeting too frequently. It can happen of course.
Test, monitor, learn and adjust to obtain a good #EngagementRate. Grow but always keep that good engagement rate in scope. Share on XIt is important to track the quality while trying to get the posting frequency right. I managed a social media audit for my company many years ago and it was very easy to spot the issues due to improper balance. Accounts that fired posts out way too much and had low quality resulted in poor engagement rates. While some had low frequency but great quality and excellent engagement rates. There is no silver bullet as each industry or topic area has different norms.
Test, monitor, learn and adjust to obtain a good engagement rate. Then do all the best practice tips to grow but always keep that good engagement rate in scope.
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Hi Clive, not only that but the amount of posting on various social networks changes often with the algorithms. It is something we always have to stay on top of.
Yes the algorithm changes do change the game plan approach. Yes I agree on that part but the formula remains the same but the values might change a bit, A bigger issue is new channels that define engagement actions differently. The formula needs adjusting in cases like these.