Engagement Rate is a measure of quality or efficiency that allows marketers to assess the performance of a piece of content, as well as the overall performance of an influencer in the context of a specific initiative, per and across platforms.

How is  Engagement Rate defined?

The Engagement Rate of a post is calculated based on its total engagements divided by its potential reach, and expressed as a percentage. 

For example, an Twitter post with 500 likes published on a account with 50K followers  has a 0.01 or 1% Engagement Rate.

For a group of posts, the Engagement rate is calculated by averaging the Engagement Rate of each individual post.

What’s a good Engagement Rate?

While Engagement Rates vary by platform and industry, these are some general guidelines to consider when trying to assess what is a good Engagement Rate: 

  • Great Engagement Rates are between 3% and 6% (way above average)
  • Good Engagement Rates are between 2% and 3% (above average)
  • Decent Engagement Rates are between 1% and 2% (below average)
  • Below 1% Engagement Rate is considered poor
  • Above 6% Engagement Rate is considered exceptional and unusually high values can be the sign of a post gone viral

Engagement Rate is contextual

Engagement Rate varies by platform, but even for a specific influencer, it can vary a lot within the same social account. It depends on the kind of content they post. For example, sponsored content usually gets slightly lower engagement. Sharing links on Twitter gets very low engagement rates (close to zero). 

As a result, the average engagement rate across all content is usually not reflecting the performance an influencer can achieve when publishing genuine content about their area of expertise. Therefore, Engagement Rate is best measured “in context”, for instance as part of an Influence report, using the Leaderboard, Performance, or Heatmap views.

Where can I see Engagement Rates?

Engagement Rate is available in all Influence reports for the last 2 years.

What platforms are supported?

Influence reports currently surface Engagement Rate for the main social networks. 

How can I use Engagement Rate to compare influencer performance?

Engagement Rate is a great proxy to compare or rank influencers by performance.
Because it’s audience-neutral, Top Tier influencers don’t necessarily rank at the top like they do when ranking by Total Engagement or Average Engagement per Post.

To compare or rank influencers, you can use one of the following views of the Influence report:

  • Performance: This view gives a holistic picture of all influencer performance metrics for a specific brand or topic
  • Heatmap: This view helps you compare an influencer's engagement rate for different brands or topics 

In both cases, it's recommended to look at large time frames when comparing influencers -- yielding enough posts per influencer to calculate meaningful averages of their performance. In some cases one month is enough, in other cases three months will yield more accurate results.

If the volume of posts is low, Engagement Rate might not be representative of what the influencer can consistently achieve.

If your report is defined by a campaign time frame that is narrow, consider looking at more metrics like Total Engagement, which are less sensitive to low volume biases.

I see a very high Engagement Rate, how come?

A very high engagement rate of a single post could mean the post went viral, especially if the influencer has a small audience and that post was shared widely outside of their normal circle. 

Next: Measuring the Potential Reach of influencer content

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