Social media marketing Engagement continues to grow in popularity, as these platforms are proving to be very successful when it comes to helping grow a brand and establishing new audiences. Businesses that decide to market products and/or services on a social media platform must understand how efficient a platform is to determine its next promotional steps. This requires every business to know their numbers, with engagement rate numbers being one of the more significant.
Social media engagement refers to learning exactly how people are interacting with a certain social media account or marketing campaign. Measurements allow a business to evaluate large metrics, like how successful a particular campaign is performing. Smaller metrics include how well a social strategy is performing. Engagement metrics specifically focus on understanding how much an audience is actually interacting with the content, images, etc. within a platform, and why.
Social media campaigns must be properly measured to understand their effectiveness. Depending on a business’s social media goals will determine the number of social media measurements it wants to incorporate into its social media marketing strategy.
It’s important to measure every social media campaign to learn what’s working, and what’s not. Especially now with the world of marketing transitioning into a digital culture. Campaigns that don’t perform as well as expected can benefit from learning what’s wrong and can thus make the necessary improvements.
Every business needs to understand its return on investment (ROI). In order for social media marketers to measure their social media ROI, they must first know how to properly measure their social media engagement numbers.
- Posts. Post engagement rates refer to the number of people engaging with a certain post divided by the number of impressions or reach. High engagement rates mean many people enjoyed the post, while low engagement rates mean most people didn’t find the post interesting enough to care about taking action.
- Likes, Comments. A Like is one of the simplest measurements to track. The majority of social media platforms use the Like feature to help determine how popular a social media post, image, etc. is for those who see it. To calculate this simple yet informative engagement rate take the number of Likes and comments on a particular post and divide by the total number of followers.
- Social Sharing. Some people enjoy a post so much they feel the need to share it with others. A goal of having others share a social media post is ideal when it comes to building traffic, and an increase in traffic often leads to higher engagement numbers. The fact that shares influence how others see a post makes social sharing one of the more important forms of social media engagements.
- Replies. Replying to comments in a timely manner is essential when it comes to increasing engagement numbers. The more involved a brand is with its followers, the more likely it’ll experience higher engagement rates. Audiences want to directly connect with brands nowadays, making it necessary for brands to respond often to their audience in order to receive high engagement rates.
- Clicks. Clicks per post are a popular engagement measure when sharing posts or third-party content. Clicks help measure how much traffic a social media campaign is receiving. High engagement rates tend to mean the content is properly aligned with the brand and thus being well received. Low engagement rates often mean the opposite.
- Audience Growth Rate. Growing an audience over time is a goal for every business. Keeping track of the number of new followers is one of the more important measurements to keep track of. Continual audience growth is a sign that an individual, business, brand, etc. is doing what’s necessary to capture the attention of its audience.
The majority of social media marketing experts state a good social media engagement rate should fall between 1% and 5%, depending on the platform. Currently, Instagram is the social media platform that receives the highest amount of engagement rates at 4.59%. Facebook has an average rate of engagement of about 2%, considered low. LinkedIn has an average rate of engagement of about 2%, considered good. Twitter engagement rates are a little on the low side right now, with .5% a good rate. TikTok rates are currently very high at nearly 18%.
While measuring social media engagement is a big undertaking, it’s an essential task that results in necessary findings. Anyone promoting a product and/or service nowadays needs to measure their engagement rates to understand how actively involved their audience is. Even if a brand has an audience of millions it can still have a low engagement rate, often a result of producing low-quality content.
Measuring engagement requires answers – How often does a follower visit an account? How often do they interact with the account? How responsive are they? What engagement activities are they participating in?
There are two main methods used when calculating social media engagement rates. Marketing managers can use public information and figure out the measurements themselves or they can hire a social media management company.
Sprout Social. This complete social media engagement analytics platform thoroughly evaluates user engagement for social media content. They offer a wide variety of impressive engagement tools so brands can better learn and thus better address the needs of their audience. Top features include quickly accessing data from any social media platform, building custom templates for creating custom reports, and comparing a brand’s engagement numbers to its competitors.
BuzzSumo. This social competition analysis tool offers everything a business needs to measure the engagement of its content. Top features include free chrome extensions to help analyze content, the ability to check and monitor brand mentions on any social media platform, and the ability to check social sharing posts to see which one’s are receiving higher engagements.
Agorapulse. This social media management tool utilizes a web interface that makes it clear and easy to view engagement rates. They offer social reporting metrics that matter, allowing any business to understand what’s working, and what isn’t when it comes to engagement rates. Top features include a new user interface, the addition of new engagement metrics, and the option for high engagement rate businesses to take bulk actions.
HootSuite. This social media marketing agency is known as one of the best when it comes to social listening. Many top brands utilize the services of HootSuite to measure their social media engagement, including Marketo and SXSW. Top features include access to social listening tools like Talkwalker and Brandwatch, the ability to uncover new insights and learn about upcoming trends, and the ability to calculate the ROI for brand campaigns.
Keyhole. This online tool for measuring engagement rates also offers monitoring tools and social brand reputation tools. They make it easy for brands to check their essential metrics so they can learn about their engagement rates in a simple and forward manner. Google, Loreal, and BBC News use this social media engagement platform. Top features include providing in-depth analytics, monitoring brand mentions, and using special technology that predicts future campaign performance.
Zoho Social. This straightforward social brand monitoring software makes it easy to check all the metrics related to audience engagement. Top features include creating templates to produce custom reports, the ability to create visual graphs for easy-to-understand results, and an app so businesses can look up their engagement rates quickly.
Later. This complete social media engagement monitoring and optimization tool makes it easy for any business to understand the current status of their social media engagements. This Instagram marketing platform offers many of today’s top tools for measuring engagement rates, making it a popular one. Top features include automatically calculating the engagement rate of Instagram posts, advising on the best time to post based on most engagements, and allowing the ability for businesses to track engagements for up to three full months.
Any business can improve its engagement rates when they’re not as high as expected. While creating quality content is crucial when it comes to improving engagement, other proven tactics include always being authentic, posting a wide variety of content, posting regular content at relevant times, only sharing best images, creating quality video content, being readily available to answer questions, and always utilizing calls to action.
The main reason why so many businesses are now using social media to promote their brand is because they can potentially gain access to their target audience in a short amount of time. Another popular reason is that most of the social media platforms now utilized for marketing, making them easy to understand and easy to manage.
Social media engagement rates are essential indicators when it comes to fully understanding the performance of a marketing plan. Marketers who are always on top of their engagement rates tend to experience higher engagement rates.
