What is a Good Engagement Rate? How to Calculate Engagement on Instagram, TikTok & Facebook

In the past few years, social media has become an essential tool for many businesses to promote their products and services.

With more than 4.5 billion users worldwide (out of 4.8 billion global internet users as of 2021), it was inevitable that social media marketing would take over as one of the most important marketing channels.

But with so many social network options to choose from, which one should your business focus on? Each platform has its own unique features and benefits, so it’s important to do your research and determine which platform is best suited for your business.

For example, if you’re a business that sells clothes, you may want to focus on Instagram, as it’s a visual platform that’s perfect for showcasing products. Or if you’re a business that provides services, you may want to focus on Facebook, as it has the largest user base out of all the other social platforms available.

Regardless of which one you choose, one metric that you should always keep an eye on is your engagement rate.

But what exactly do we mean by Engagement Rate (ER)? And why does it matter?

In this blog post, we’ll answer those questions and more. We’ll also provide tips on how to calculate your engagement rate, as well as how to improve it.

What are engagement rates?

If you’ve ever engaged or thought about engaging in digital marketing then the phrase “engagement rate” would have popped up at some stage. What does this mean and why should they matter to you as a marketer?

Glad you asked!

ER is a vital social media metric enabling brands and agencies to measure the effectiveness of influencer actions and better understand how their audience engages with their content.  Essentially, ER provides data that helps determine which influencers to work with based on how their content performs across different platforms.

Simply put, it is the percentage of the influencer’s audience that responds and reacts. For example; likes, comments, and shares.

What is a good Instagram engagement rate?

How do we measure an Instagram influencer’s engagement rate and what constitutes good engagement rate?

There are several most common manual ways to calculate engagement rate on social media.

This formula is typically used to calculate engagement rate by post (ER post):

• ER (%) = (Total engagements on a post / Total followers) * 100%
• Average ER (%) = ER (%) / Total Posts

Most social media influencers and brands manually calculate their average engagement rate on Instagram this way:

• ER (%) on Instagram = ((Likes + Comments) / Follower Counts) * 100%
• Average ER (%) on Instagram = ER (%) on Instagram / Total Posts

For example, let’s say influencer has 100,000 followers, 2,000 likes and 300 comments on his / her last post. In that case:

• ER (%) on Instagram = ((2,000 + 300) / 100,000) * 100% = 2.3%

If last post engagement = 2.3% and second last post engagement = 2.1%, then:

• Average ER (%) on Instagram = (2.3%+2.1%) / (Total Posts = 2) = 2.2%

You can do it manually or you can have theright.fit do all the work for you!

How theright.fit calculates average engagement rate (a scientific approach) on Instagram

In June 2019, theright.fit together with Persollo ran a benchmark study, analysing the engagement rate on millions of influencer accounts. The covered pool of accounts was divided into 10 groups, based on the number of followers.

We calculated the average engagement rates for each group of similar accounts and set the benchmark for the groups. We haven’t used the traditional formulas but came up with our own calculations.

To achieve further depth in the analysis we then ran an analysis of trends in each group of similar accounts – and set benchmarks for the average engagement rate, likes, comments per the last 3, last 7 and last 12 posts.

Here is our dynamic benchmark on Average ER (%) on Instagram per aggregated groups:

• Nano Influencers are those influencers who has less than 1k followers.
• Micro Influencers are those influencers with 1k - 50k followers.
• Macro Influencers are those influencers with 50k - 500k followers.
• Super Influencers are those influencers with 500k - 3M followers.
• Super Stars are those influencers with more than 3M followers.

The average ER on Instagram in 2019 is 2.81%, but this number is irrelevant because the ER depends on the follower count.

When checking influencer’s ER you should always compare apples-to-apples and compare the engagement rate of influencers to other influencers in a similar group with similar follower count and similar trends across post engagement metrics.

What is a good engagement rate on other social media channels?

Engagement rates vary greatly depending on the industry, type of content, and other factors. However, as a general rule of thumb, a good engagement rate on any social media platform is considered to be above 1%.

• What is a good engagement rate on TikTok? Or better yet, is engagement high on TikTok? The answer is a definite YES. Multiple sources cite 17.5% as the average rate (organic) for brands on TikTok. That's 15% more than the average engagement rate on Instagram! It’s clear that if an app can make you feel good about yourself, excited about finding new content, and gives you space to be authentically creative, you’re going to want to come back for more. So if you think you can tap into this with your brand, it could be a great platform to pour all your efforts on.
• What is a good Facebook engagement rate? Facebook remains to be the top social media platform. Rival IQ calculates Facebook's engagement rate as 0.174%, with their definition of per post engagement as including likes, comments, favourites, shares, and reactions divided by the total number of followers. On their benchmark report, what is considered a good engagement rate even goes down to 0.064%. Take note of the ways in which your top-performing content are succeeding against this calculation, and see how you can apply some best practices to your Facebook social media strategy to meet this number.
• What is a good Twitter engagement rate? On Twitter, engagement rates between 0.02% and 0.09% are considered good, and anything about 1% is great. Like the other calculations, combine all the accumulated engagement actions and divide this number by the follower count. For example, for every 1000 followers, you can expect 0-1 reactions. Hashtags are a great way to boost engagement rates on social media platforms, but they’re especially important on Twitter. That’s because the platform is built around discovery, and users regularly explore content through hashtags.
• What is a good LinkedIn engagement rate? Social media posts engagement on LinkedIn are calculated by adding clicks, interactions, likes, comments, and shares for the published post divided by your page followers. You can also get the average engagement rate by post impressions if needed. On the platform, good engagement rates hover around 1-3%. It's best to get ahead on LinkedIn if you own a business targeting a community of professionals. Keep track of the kind of content that gets the best response from your followers and try to replicate those successes.

With theright.fit  – you can easily run a similar analysis on any influencer account. You can calculate an influencer’s engagement rate and you can also analyse it and compare it with other influencers with the same size of following. Based on the output of theright.fit unsupervised machine learning algorithms, each engagement rate is assigned into Very Low, Low, Medium, High and Very High groups.