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See how a post is performing with this engagement rate calculator

Calculate your engagement rate in seconds with this handy social media engagement rate calculator. 

What does ‘engagement rate’ mean?

Engagement rate measures how much your audience engages with your content. Typically, it’s calculated by comparing the total number of interactions (engagements) on a post to the size of its audience. 

We’ll dive deeper into how to calculate engagement rate below, but here are the metrics you’ll need to know before you bust out the calculator app:

• Engagements — Many social media metrics count as engagements, including comments, likes, shares, saves, clicks, DMs, and more. Typically, engagement rate formulas use the sum of all engagements from a post.

• Audience size — Your audience size can be measured by a few factors, such as follower count, reach, or impressions. It’s common to see engagement rates dip as your audience grows.

Tracking engagement rate on social media is one of the easiest ways to gauge whether or not what you’re doing is working. Luckily, there are some painless ways to keep tabs on your engagement rate across your social media channels.

Hootsuite tracks engagement rate automatically. From the second you connect your social accounts, it’ll start keeping tabs of your engagement rate by post, account, network, time period, and more. It’ll also give you your average engagement rate and create reports for brand and inbound engagement.

What is an engagement rate calculator?

An engagement rate calculator is a tool you can use to see how well a certain post performed on social media. It adds up some of the most common social media engagement metrics and then divides it by your following to calculate engagement rate in a matter of seconds.

This engagement rate calculator will work for virtually any social media network. Use it to measure engagement rate on Instagram (or use our dedicated Instagram engagement rate calculator if you prefer), Facebook, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and YouTube.

How to use this engagement rate calculator

This engagement rate calculator is a quick and easy way to see your engagement rate by post. No spreadsheet or abacus required. Here’s how to use it:

Step 1: Gather your metrics

Before you can start crunching the numbers, you’re going to need to gather some data and make some decisions. 

First, determine the number of posts you want to measure. You can use this calculator to see engagement rate by a single post or multiple posts. If you want to calculate engagement rate across a campaign or time period, add the number of posts to the second row of the calculator.

Next, you’ll need to gather the following metrics for the post(s) you want to track: number of followers, comments, shares, likes, saves, clicks, and DMs. You can get this information from the post itself, the Hootsuite dashboard, or the platform’s analytics dashboard.

Step 2: Add your metrics

Now you can start adding your numbers to the calculator. To get engagement rate by post, the calculator needs the following information:

• Number of followers on the account 

• Number of posts you’re measuring 

• Total number of comments on the post

• Total number of shares, retweets, etc.

• Total number of likes or reactions

• Total number of saves or bookmarks 

• Total number of clicks on a link or video

• Total number of private messages (DMs)

Of course, the more metrics you have, the more accurate (and likely higher) your engagement rate will be. But if you don’t have data for every single one, that’s okay. Simply leave the field at 0.

Step 3: Tap ‘Calculate’

And now for the fun part: tap “calculate” and let the tool work its magic. It’ll calculate your engagement rate for you in less than a second.

How to calculate engagement rate manually

The easiest way to calculate your engagement rate is to have Hootsuite track it for you automatically. (Because, let’s be honest, who wants to do math in this day and age?) You can also use the calculator above to get a quick and dirty idea of engagement rate by post.

If you’re set on doing things the old-fashioned way, you’ll want to start by determining your preferred engagement rate formula.

There are several different engagement rate formulas that will help you calculate your engagement rate by reach, post, impressions, views, and more.

One of the most common is engagement rate by reach (ERR). The calculation for ERR is the total number of engagements per post divided by the reach for that post times 100.

So, let’s say your post garners 50 likes, five shares, and five comments and it reaches 500 people. In this scenario, your engagement rate would be 12% — 60 (total engagements) divided by 500 (total audience) times 100. 

Why does engagement rate matter?

So why does engagement rate matter, anyway? It’s a fair question. The simple answer is that the number of people who interact with your post is an indicator of how well your post is performing (and how close you are to reaching your goals on social media).

After all, social media marketing is all about, well, being social. The more chatter and the bigger the reaction your post gets, the higher your stats will soar. To put it simply, engagement rate is a way of determining how appealing your posts are to your audience. 

If more people feel compelled to engage in the conversation, you’re much more likely to reach your goals — whether that be to get your name out there, to boost sales, or to grow your clientele. 

On the other hand, if people are scrolling by your post without stopping to engage, that could be an indicator that you’re not posting the content your audience wants to see. That means it’s probably time to give your social media strategy a bit of a spruce-up.

Remember: social media is just a digitized popularity contest. Your engagement rate is a simple way to show just how popular you are and how popular you could be.

How to automatically track engagement rate

Want to automatically track your social media performance and boost your engagement rate while you’re at it? You need Hootsuite Analytics. Within the Hootsuite dashboard, you can track performance across all your social media networks in one place so you can quickly see what’s working and what to improve.

Hootsuite also comes with a ton of helpful tools designed to give you a quick engagement boost. For example, it shows you exactly when to post based on when your audience is most likely to be online. Quick win? Yes, please.