The average value indicates what portion of the entire community audience is interested in the published materials.
The disadvantages of this metric include the fact that in most cases only community administrators can determine the reach (the exception is some VK pages, the statistics of which are freely available).
Engagement Rate by Reach (ERR)
Source: shutterstock.com
But there is a more important problem: reach is a numbers (south korean tv series) relative concept. The current value is influenced by many circumstances, such as the viral effect of the publication, the frequency of getting into the feed when using algorithms.
As a rule, social networks consider the reach as a whole, and not just among subscribers. However, if a publication produces a strong viral effect and is actively distributed by subscribers among other users, significant reach is achieved with a fairly low engagement (compared to the total number of views). Accordingly, the final ERR value of the publication decreases.
The opposite situation, typical for social networks using algorithms, occurs when a post is shown to a limited number of users whose interests it most closely matches and is most likely to elicit a response. Here, reaching a small audience leads to significant engagement.
When comparing the ERRs in the two situations presented, the latter case shows a much higher engagement.
Engagement Rate by Reach (ERR)
Source: shutterstock.com
The validity of these judgments can be easily verified if you arrange publications in descending order of ERR. Ultimately, the most frequently viewed articles will not occupy the highest positions.
Calculation example. Let's assume that we have 35,063 subscribers in our community. Let's calculate ERR using the data on the number of views of the last three publications:
64,000;
2400;
3000;
ERR (%) = (64,000 + 2400 + 3000) ÷ 3 ÷ 35,063 × 100% = 66 (%)
When assessing ERR, data should be compared over several periods. The focus should be on what materials evoke the most intense reaction from participants.
Conclusions: it is reasonable to calculate engagement by reach to understand what part of the total mass of readers responded to the post. However, this indicator is not at all suitable for a qualitative assessment of publications and does not provide objective results when comparing publications in different communities.
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Daily Engagement Rate (ER Day)
ER Day for the selected time period is calculated using the basic formula:
ER Day = (Total reactions for day / Followers) * 100%
Av/ ER Day = (Total reactions for period / (Count of days * Followers)) * 100%
The final value shows, roughly speaking, how many people out of all community members were active during the day.
Why conditionally? The fact is that during the calculation of the indicator, significant deviations caused by repeated manifestations of activity by individual subscribers are not taken into account.
This applies to all ER metrics, but for ER Day the deviations are more pronounced, since the final value depends to a greater extent on how actively the user responded to the posts related to a specific date.
Also, this metric is not entirely successful because it does not correlate with the frequency of publications: to increase ER Day, it is quite enough to post more posts (the principle applies here - with a greater number of publications, activity increases accordingly).
Takeaway: Daily activity gives you an idea of how active your followers are, or the “effective reach” (volume of engagement) of your page, but it’s not necessarily more useful than pure engagement volume as a percentage (Engagement Volume).
Engagement Rate by posts (ER Post)
The basic formula in this case is:
ER Post = (Total reactions of post / Followers) * 100%
Av. ER Post = (Total reactions of post / (Count of posts *Followers)) * 100%
Or:
Av. ER Post = (Total ER Post / Count of posts) * 100%
The final value shows what proportion of users on average responded to a particular publication.
This indicator is based on the number of subscribers in absolute terms, so its value will not fluctuate much as new publications are released. Due to this, high-quality and interesting publications can be selected by sorting.
Engagement Rate by posts (ER Post)
Source: shutterstock.com
The disadvantage here is that the overall engagement percentage drops as the number of subscribers increases. This can be explained by the fact that subscribers gradually lose interest in the community, because the overall number of subscriptions increases, community materials are shown to them less often, etc.
Thus, if the audience sizes of communities differ significantly, when comparing ER, the values should first be adjusted taking into account the average indicators.
Conclusions: ER Post allows you to assess the audience's interest in publications, and compare the activity levels of different communities (adjusting for differences in the number of participants).
Let's look at other possible ways to calculate Engagement Rate: