How to Measure Engagement Rate on Facebook

If you spend an hour with a social media manager, you will definitely end up discussing Facebook engagement and its importance. However, what does Facebook engagement mean? In this article, we’ll go into detail about how to measure engagement rate on Facebook.

What is Facebook Engagement?

To put it in simple terms, Facebook engagement is any action that a person takes on one of your comments or posts in your groups, pages, or ads. These actions include link clicks, shares, comments, and reactions.

Your Facebook engagement should provide an honest valuation of the quality of your content and efforts since you’ll be factoring out the number of followers you have. For instance, you can say you’re not producing enough quality content if you receive a dozen engagements per one post, but your business has millions of followers.

Key Terms

Before going into the specifics of Facebook engagement, we want to go over some key terms.

• Reach – How many people have seen your post in their timelines.
• Clicks – The number of people that have clicked on a link or image in your post.
• Shares – How many times users shared your post on their own page.
• Comments – How many people have commented on your posts.
• Likes – The number of people who liked your post.

How to Measure Engagement Rate on Facebook?

The engagement rate offers you a more precise representation of content performance than simply looking at things like comments, shares, and likes. An engagement rate is calculated by dividing the total engagement with total followers and multiplying it by 100.

(total engagement / followers ) x 100 = Engagement Rate

For instance, let’s say that a company posted an article on their Facebook page to their 10,000 fans and received 100 shares, 100 comments, and 200 likes.

This means that the total engagement would be:

400 (100+100+200)

When we calculate this company’s engagement rate with the equation we provided above, it will go something like this:

400 / 10,000 x 100% = 4%.

You will need to benchmark your engagement rate against something else so you can determine if the rate is bad or good. You can benchmark your own engagement rate over time by asking yourself how your content performs in a given time period. Try benchmarking against your key competitors by comparing your performance against competitors.

You can benchmark against top industry players by creating a benchmark for your industry’s social media engagement performance. You can also benchmark against your own social media profiles by comparing your performance on different social media platforms.

Typically, this can take hours of reporting or calculating. However, there are many online tools that can help you with calculating your engagement rate.

Best Practices

Make sure that you have a Facebook contest, ask questions, post photos, and have a call to action. People don’t want to hear about your products all day.

Since engagement fluctuates quite a lot, you should monitor the rate of engagement constantly, perhaps even daily.

Remember is that timing is crucial when it comes to engagement. You don’t want to post on social media pages when everyone is sleeping or is at work. A better time for posting would be considered when people are in transit or just coming back from work. These are usually times that people check their phones for any updates.

Tips For Increasing Facebook Engagement

Following are a few tips that can help you in increasing your Facebook Engagement.

Make sure you’re relatable

Post more personal content as a way to increase your engagement rate. If your brand only shares testimonials or stuff you have on sale, you won’t get much interaction from your audience.

But, if you share information about how your brand is celebrating its birthday or how you are currently feeling, you will get much better results.

These better results will come in the form of shares, comments, and likes. Also, make sure you keep your posts short. People don’t want to spend too much time on one post while scrolling on their timeline.

Know your audience and post content they like

In an other hand, you should make sure to know your audience and what type of content they like. To do so, have a look at your Facebook analytics and make sure to keep an eye on the number of likes and comments each and everyone of your posts receive. If one of your posts seems to be getting more likes and comments than the others, then it is pointing you in the right direction.

Once you know your audience and what type of content they like, you can start adapting and tailoring your posts. Do not be afraid to think outside the box and to share diversified content, otherwise your audience might start to think your posts are quite repetitive. The more your content is original and personalised, the more engagement it receives.

Post less, but at optimal times

According to Hubspot, the best days to post on Facebook are from Thursday to Sunday. Likewise, the best times to post on Facebook are:

• At 9am, when people are starting work and going online for the first time of the day,
• Between 11am and 12am, when people are having lunch,
• And from 3pm to 4pm.

In order to increase Facebook engagement rate, it is indeed crucial to make sure you post at optimal times, that is to say at times when people are going on Facebook and are the most active on it. Otherwise, it is likely that your posts will go unnoticed. Creating and then maintaining a social media calendar is a great way to make sure you always post at optimal times.

By posting at optimal times, you will be able to increase the engagement your posts receive. Maybe you could even start creating some sort of a virtuous cycle: the higher the engagement rate of a post, the more visible it will get on Facebook, and the more the engagement rate will keep growing as a consequence.

It is also worth noting that posting more will not necessarily help with engagement. It is better to focus on the quality of each of your posts, rather than trying to post as much content as possible.

Upload more photos and videos

It is no secret that, on Facebook, content which includes either a photo or a video has more reach than content displaying long texts. When on social media, people are way more likely to stop scrolling when they see visual content.

Therefore, in order to increase engagement rate on your posts, you should definitely start posting more photos and creating short videos. You could also try to do Facebook stories. These can be posted for only 24 hours, thus triggering a feeling of urgency in people who want to have a look at your content before it disappears. Photos, videos and stories will for sure help you get noticed!

Participate in related groups and pages

Another way to generate engagement is to participate in popular Facebook groups or pages. Begin sharing content and engaging with pages and groups your audience is already interacting with.

Reply to your audience

Just as you would not leave a customer email in your inbox without replying to it, on Facebook, you should also always make sure to answer all comments. Indeed, increasing Facebook engagement rate isn’t just about making your audience react to your posts. It is also about you replying to them and taking the time to answer their comments.

Answering people’s comments under your posts will help you strengthen your community, build trust with potential customers and foster loyalty with already existing customers.

Making a habit of answering to Facebook users’ comments under your posts, will inevitably draw your community’s Facebook engagement rate as people will feel seen and heard, and will thus be more likely to comment one of your posts again in the future.

Also, according to a study from the Harvard Business Review, potential customers are seven times more likely to become leads when firms answer to their query within an hour, than when they reply to their query after an hour has passed.

This observation draws the attention to the idea that you should always answer your audience’s comments, in a timely manner, in order to increase Facebook engagement rate and, ultimately, attract new customers.

By using Ideta’s Facebook auto comment tool, you will be able to make sure not to miss any comment and to answer every single one of them with either a public message or a private message or both, automatically and in seconds!

For example, let’s say you want to share a discount code with your audience but you don’t want anyone to have access to it.

You can send your code only to the people who commented. But doing this by hand is tedious. You can use our Facebook Reply tool to automatically send private messages to fans who commented on your post!

Moreover, by implementing an Ideta chatbot into your Facebook account, you could be able to answer all private messages received on Messenger at any hour of the day or night! Check out our article about chatbots for more information.

Include calls to action in your posts

Last but not least, in order to improve your Facebook engagement strategy, it is crucial that you create interactive content and include calls to action in your posts as often as possible. A call to action will inevitably boost Facebook engagement rate!

There are many ways to engage with your audience. You can start by simply asking people questions. You can also post surveys or quizzes. The more your content will be interactive and fun, the more people will be interested in it.

In conclusion

To conclude, nowadays, putting in place a Facebook engagement strategy is crucial for businesses. Increasing Facebook engagement rate, that is to say increasing the likeliness of people liking or commenting on your posts, is the key to building a strong community and improving your lead generation as well as your conversion rates.

Set aside time for replying to your audience, or get the help of a Facebook auto-reply app!