Engagement
What is engagement?
Engagement generally refers to how involved or interested people are in something. It could be an activity, a conversation, or even an online post. In essence, engagement is about participation, involvement, and interest. When something is engaging, it grabs your attention and encourages you to actively be a part of it.
Engagement on social media refers to the level to which an audience interacts and engages with the content that a brand or individual shares on social platforms. This engagement can be expressed through actions such as liking, sharing, commenting, clicking on links, participating in surveys, or any other form of interaction that indicates an active connection with the content. A high level of engagement on social media often indicates a strong and positive relationship between the brand or person and their audience, which is crucial for building and maintaining a successful online presence.
How is it calculated?
You can set up the formula to calculate the engagement of posts in brand settings (you can save the change for all the brands).
You can choose between two options:
Ratio x 100: the applied formula will be interactions received per 100 people reached.
Ratio x1000: the applied formula will be interactions received per 1000 people reached.
Note that for Twitter and LinkedIn, impressions are used instead of reach.
Previously, we displayed engagement as a ratio over 1000; now it will be calculated x100 by default.
Although depending on the social network, the formula can vary slightly. We have several articles that describe it in detail for each social network:
X (Twitter)
Tik Tok
Analyzing your Engagement
Keep in mind that engagement is a metric established by the proportional relationship between interactions and reach. We provide an example:
A post with 50 interactions and a reach of 100 people has higher engagement (50%) than a post with 1000 interactions and 10,000 people reached (10%). In other words, in the first case, the level of involvement has been higher despite reaching fewer people.
In Metricool, you can track the evolution of your engagement compared to the same previous period. As an example, in the screenshot, the engagement result is 134 out of 1000, showing an increase of 20.54, equivalent to 18.11% more than in the previous 31 days.
If you want to analyze more thoroughly and apply the engagement formula manually, remember that you should first calculate the total reach by multiplying the average reach per post by the number of posts.
💡 We recommend applying the x1000 ratio for accounts with a larger number of followers, as it provides more details (Interactions / Reach 1000) and adding competitors for a reference of engagement in your industry. *
Competitors Engagement
As for the engagement of the competitors, it is calculated differently from the engagement of your account, so we recommend adding the account itself as a competitor to make the data comparable. The formula would be: Average of Interactions / number followers * 100 (or 1000, depending on which formula you have set).
That is, unlike the engagement shown for your own account, the average of interactions and the number of followers is used. We do not use the Reach because this metric is not public and therefore we cannot access it for competitors.
Want to know more? Check out our blog post "What Should My Engagement Rate on Social Media Look Like?"
Updated on: 24/03/2025
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