Why your engagement rate is everything when it comes to digital marketing

Whether you post once a month or once a day across your socials, if you aren’t dissecting how many interactions you get, then you may as well not be posting, says Katrina Bell.

In the simplest form, your engagement rate (ER) is a snapshot of how much and often your audience interacts with your brand. That is in direct alignment with how successful you are at creating content. Chicken and egg, if you will. 

And the reality is, the platforms will not organically push out your content to new viewers if the quality is low. The algorithms regard low ER as low quality. That’s one of the few baselines the platforms are never going to change, even if the post formats feel like they change every week. 

Who really can instantly remember the difference between a reel, a carousel or a post and which of those is more popular on each platform? 

While the reporting mechanisms for individual channels are unhelpfully not universal, your ER data is easily accessible. They all have native dashboards that provide the analytics you need. Alternatively you can leverage the power of tools such as SproutSocial, Keyhole or MailChimp that keep track of multiple platforms simultaneously. 

Your ER is the total interactions on a piece of content divided by your total number of followers, multiplied by 100%. With that figure in hand, you can start breaking down what you are doing right – or not. Number of views does not count as engagement, by the way. 

These are some of  the signs to look out for that suggests your content is hollowing out and meaningful potential connections are being lost.

Post interactions: high likes, no comments or shares? This is a missed opportunity to convert views to actions. Your audience liked the content fine but didn’t find it useful or relatable to their life or experience. It probably isn’t filling a knowledge gap or prompting them to ask for a deeper dive on a subject. 

Video interactions: healthy views, high drop-off rates? Have you checked how many users got three quarters of the way through, or more? Your ER should also include the drop-off rate. Starting a series is a great way to ensure new subscriptions that get people coming back, and keep them watching. 

Curated interactions: Your paid-for ad content will also come with pretty sophisticated data relating to your click-through-rates (CTRs) and or cost-per-click (CPC) information.

Granular interactions: You expend effort in replying to posts and comments across social media but you are rarely tagged? Your industry peers haven’t cottoned on that even B2B social followers need to be proactive. You could incentivise them to reply by tagging them. 

Static click-through rates: You may have picked up lots of lovely new followers, but they may not be the ones you want. A viral TikTok is fun, but if the audience isn’t buying your products or services, you won’t see a lot of traffic to your website. In other words, it could be time to rethink your content management strategies.