Is 10% a good engagement rate?

In today’s highly competitive business environment, having a good social strategy is paramount for your business. In 2018, Facebooks remains one of the most popular channels used by top B2C and B2B brands. Statistics show that active users on Facebook jumped from 1.94 billion in March 2017 to 2.2 billion as of March 2018; and the number of mobile daily users have been increasing over the past few years. These statistics continue to highlight the importance of running digital marketing campaigns on Facebook.

It goes without saying that engagement plays an essential role in digital marketing campaigns. Why is engagement rate important? Because it tells you how well individuals interact with your Facebook content. Engagement rate is an indicator of whether individuals find your content interesting, resonant, and worth interacting with.

How do we calculate Facebook engagement rate? Interestingly, marketers and businesses may calculate Facebook engagement rate in different ways. Before we dive into the various ways of calculating Facebook engagement rate, let’s first look at what some of the most commonly used digital marketing terms mean.

• Engagement - Any measurable interactions with your social content such as shares, comments, likes, and clicks
• Clicks - The total number of times a piece of content has been clicked on or watched
• Shares - The total number of times a piece of content has been shared
• Likes - The total number of times a piece of content has been liked
• Comments - The total number of comments a piece of content has received
• Follows - The total number of new followers acquired via a piece of content
• Impressions - The total number of times a piece of content has been viewed
• Total Engagement = clicks/plays + shares + likes + comments + follows

Now that you have a general understanding of these commonly used social media marketing terms, let’s talk about the different types of measurement methods for Facebook engagement rate, as well as their pros and cons.

1) Engagement Rate = Total Engagements/Followers

Followers/fans are those individuals whom your post could potentially be directly exposed to. This type of calculation measures engagement on a per follower/fan basis.

Pros: Easy to calculate; follower/fan-base quality assessment.

Cons: Non-follower engagement is not taken into account at all.

2) Engagement Rate = Total Engagements/Reaches

Reaches refer to the number of individuals that you post is exposed to. This type of calculation measures engagement on a per individual basis.

Pros: Post quality assessment

Cons: Impression frequency is not taken into consideration

3)  Engagement Rate = Total Engagements/Impressions

Impressions refer to the number of times your content is viewed/displayed. This type of calculation measures engagement on a per view/display basis.

Pros: Useful metric for measuring cost per thousand (CPM)

Cons: Variable frequency can lead to inconsistent results (impression = reach x frequency).

Okay. We have covered 3 types of Facebook engagement rate measurement method. Let’s discuss what a good Facebook engagement rate actually is.

-       For the fan/follower-based measurement method, a Facebook engagement rate that’s above 1% is considered good. If your posts continuously have a lower than 1% engagement rate, chances are you have a very inactive follower base and your followers aren’t engaged with your content. You should work out a strategy to re-energise your content and engage with your followers/fans again.

-       For the reach- and impression-based measurement method, a 1% - 2% Facebook engagement rate is considered good. This is because promoted content is usually tailored to a unique group of audience. You can select the targeting criteria before promoting the content. If your posts have a lower than 0.7% engagement rate on average, you may need to rework your targeting criteria as you could be targeting the wrong audience. Also, it’s possible that the content you created is just not as engaging as you thought it would be.

To sum up, there are different types of measurement methods to calculate Facebook engagement rate. It’s crucial for businesses and marketers to choose campaign KPIs that best align with their goals and objectives. It’s time for you to start putting more effort into deciding on how the campaign results can be categorised and used to improve your future campaign performance.

When I first heard the term engagement rate I had no idea what it meant. It sounded like academic jargon for how many weddings you’ll have to attend that summer or how many people actually laughed at your lame joke about horses with broken legs. 

But after two years of obsessively checking my Instagram account fifty times a day, I’ve learned a thing or two about the platform. That includes the wildly misunderstood and often dreaded Instagram engagement rate.

I recently wrote a very popular post full of tips on how to increase Instagram engagement, but it turns out many people were still unsure whether their current engagement rate was good or not. I don’t blame them – finding information about what constitutes a good engagement rate is strangely difficult.

That’s why I’ve decided to dedicate a whole blog post to answering this common question. I really hope it helps you tame the slippery chameleon that is Instagram with its ever-changing algorithm.

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What is the Instagram engagement rate?

Simply put, your Instagram engagement rate is the number of likes and comments you receive divided by the number of followers you have times one hundred. This is usually calculated for a specific time period such as the past month. Calculating for your account overall would give you skewed results as it will evolve and grow over time. You could do this manually using the formula below but services like Iconosquare will do it for you.

Why is my Instagram engagement rate important?

Your engagement rate matters because it determines how much people like you. No, of course it doesn’t! Don’t cry my little seahorse! But it does reveal how many people are connecting with your content and directly interacting with it.

A high engagement rate is a great sign that your followers listen to what you have to say. This is particularly important to brands that may wish to introduce their products to your audience. Instagram is full of brands – 7 out of 10 hashtags are branded and 65% of top-performing posts feature products [source]. This is the main way people like me make money on the platform and it’s one of the reasons your engagement rate matters.

A low engagement rate, on the other hand, can mean a number of things. If it’s absolutely abysmal – we’ll get to the numbers shortly – it often means that the person in question bought their followers. It can also mean that the content they produce is low quality. It could be a sign they don’t engage with others on the platform.

But it could simply be that they fell prey to an algorithm change through little fault of their own and their content is not reaching many of their followers.

What is a good Instagram engagement rate?

Every Facebook group I’m in (including my own) is full of people asking this question. “I have x followers and get y likes? Is that good enough?” I could say a lot about the way social media has reduced our self-worth to numbers but I’ll save that for another time. What I am going to say is… if your audience isn’t fake you probably have nothing to worry about.

What I mean by that is – did you buy your followers or use bots to grow your numbers? If you didn’t, you should be fine. If you did, what’s done is done but it’s never too late to make your strategy more ethical. Same goes for using the follow-unfollow method. Ok, now let’s get to the good stuff. Here are the numbers you’ve been waiting for so patiently.

As you can see from the diagram the average engagement rates change as your account grows. As for me? At 80,000+ followers my Instagram engagement rate hovers around 2.5%. Yay, I’m average!

How much does my Instagram engagement rate matter?

Your Instagram engagement matters because of all the reasons we discussed earlier. An exceptionally low engagement rate can definitely serve as a red flag as can an uncharacteristically high one. But it’s not the be-all and end-all.

Some people’s reach – the number of unique accounts that see your posts – has tanked without much reason or explanation. In fact, Instagram engagement keeps dropping across the board as the platform makes new changes to its algorithm. Interactions dropped by 33% between 2015 and 2016 [source], and the downward trend is sure to continue.

But it’s not just Instagram’s fault. There are more and more people using it and the quality of the content is rising across the board. While that’s not a bad thing, it does mean there’s a lot more incredible photography competing for people’s attention which makes it harder to stand out.

How can I increase my Instagram engagement?

I could easily write a whole book trying to give you a satisfactory answer to this question. I haven’t quite found the time to do that yet, but here’s a helpful post I’ve written about the 25 best ways to increase Instagram engagement. Open it in a new tab but stay here a little longer because I want to give you the short answer while I have your attention. Or stay here and watch the video below, because I included even more up-to-date information in it!

Your success as an Instagrammer rests on two main pillars – photography and activity. You’re probably bored of people saying this over and over but if your photos aren’t good nothing else really matters. In fact, good photos are barely enough anymore. They need to be great so you should only be posting your very best content. And only after nicely editing it.

The second pillar is activity, by which I mean being a good member of the Instagram community and talking to others. Don’t be that sulky kid in the back row that just sits there scribbling Fallout Boy lyrics onto a piece of paper. Essentially, don’t be my 9th grade self. Be friendly, post thoughtful comments (i.e. not a row of heart-eyed emojis) and form genuine connections with other users.

You should also try to be consistent, which doesn’t necessarily mean posting daily but often enough that people don’t forget about you. Make use of all Instagram features including Stories and live video to keep your followers engaged – yup, there’s that word again.

All of this is not to say that these are the only two things you need. I wish! But without them it will be difficult for you to get very far. So improve your photography, spend more time engaging with people and then move on to the other tips in my article.

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I really hope you found this post helpful and that I answered your question. If you have any other questions about Instagram, please leave them in a comment below and I’ll try to address them in one of my future posts. But now I have a few questions of my own…

Do you struggle with your Instagram engagement rate? What are your biggest frustrations with the platform? And what’s your username? I’d love to check out all your profiles! 

Is a 6% engagement rate on Instagram good?

Can an engagement rate be 100%?

Is 10% a good engagement?

Is a 13% engagement rate good?