Engagement rate

[bitheeranidas00742]

Audience engagement is determined by a specific indicator called engagement rate (ER). It reflects the percentage of the account's active audience. Active user actions include likes, comments, repeated views of stories, reposts, saves, etc. The more often reactions to content are recorded, the higher the engagement rate will be. The rate depends heavily on the number of subscribers. For example, for a small blog with an audience of 5,000 people, an ER of 10% would be normal, while for a blog with a million followers, an ER of 2-3% is considered an excellent result.



This metric is not displayed in the social network interface. Therefore, ER is calculated manually or special services on the Internet are used to evaluate the effectiveness of published content and understand which posts, videos and stories are more popular and which ones should not be published.



Why is it important to know ER?





The engagement rate directly affects reach. It is no secret that in almost all social networks, news feed algorithms adapt to the interests of the audience and show the content that users are most likely to  respond to. Algorithms analyze the behavior of subscribers and the engagement rates of publications. Simply put, the system will first show a new post to a small number of people. If it gets a lot of reactions, it will become available for viewing by a larger audience. After that, the ER becomes even higher, and the publication can get into recommendations or into the top positions of the hashtag search results.





It can be concluded that ER helps increase the number of subscribers without paid promotion. Algorithms understand that the content is of interest and begin to offer it for viewing to users who are not subscribed to the account. Thus, one post can collect a huge number of reactions.



Formulas for calculating ER





ER account

The value of this coefficient is analyzed dynamically: the change in engagement is tracked with an increase in the number of subscribers or the indicator for the previous period is compared with the current one. Such an analysis will help to understand whether it is worth making changes to the content plan or not. The account engagement coefficient can be calculated using the formula:



ER = Reactions ÷ Followers x 100%.



Reactions are all audience interactions with all publications over a certain period. You need to take the number of posts published, for example, in a month, and count how many reactions they got.



You can also determine the ER for an account based on reach. You can understand how not only subscribers but the social network audience as a whole react to the content by calculating the coefficient using the formula:



ER = Reactions ÷ Reach x 100%.



The calculation takes into account the reach of all posts published during the selected period.



ER post

The coefficient must be determined for several posts at once in order to conclude which content is of interest to the audience and which should not be published. To calculate the indicator, use the formula: