It's not enough to simply create content. To be successful, brands need to make sure their content really resonates with their audiences. While vanity metrics like shares, page views and retweets are easily measured, they can be misleading. A more actionable way to measure what resonates with your community is tracking your content’s engagement.

Engagement looks at the amount of interaction your content earns relative to reach or other audience figures. While there are multiple ways to measure engagement, different calculations suit different social media objectives. That’s why Socialbakers offers various ways to measure engagement:

• Interactions
  This metric looks at the number of interactions the published posts received (comments, likes, etc) during a selected time range.
  
  
• Interactions per 1k Followers
  The Interactions per 1k Followers metric is a percentage that is calculated by adding all interactions per 1000 followers of an individual post, dividing the sum by the number of followers a profile had at the time of posting, and finally multiply the result by 1000.
  
  
• Engagement Rate
  The latest engagement metric we’ve added to the platform is Engagement Rate. You can access the new metric in two ways:
  
  1. In Dashboard – Flexible Widgets
  
  
  
  2. Via Socialbakers API - Click here to learn how to get access to the API.
  
  

While Engagement Rate is a very common metric, there’s no standard way to
measure it - this article will shed some light on this subject. It will give you some good to know information and add transparency to the way Engagement Rate is calculated both in Flexible Widgets and Socialbakers API.

How Does Socialbakers Calculate Engagement Rates?

It’s important to understand that when you’re comparing the Engagement Rate in Flexible Widgets with the Engagement Rate in Socialbakers API, values will vary slightly, due to different data aggregation methods.

Engagement Rate Calculation in Flexible Widgets:

• The Engagement Rate for an individual post shows the number of interactions of a post per fan. Engagement Rate is therefore calculated by dividing the number of interactions of a post by the number of fans from the day the post was published. The value is finally multiplied by 100 and displayed as a percentage.

• The Engagement Rate for a set of posts is calculated as a simple average of the Engagement Rates of individual posts. As this calculation is independent of the profile that published the posts, you can break down the metric into buckets like post labels, content type, published / unpublished, etc.
  
  

Engagement Rate Calculation in Socialbakers API:

• This metric calculation displays the average number of interactions per fan, per post. Engagement Rate for a day is therefore calculated by dividing the number of interactions from posts published during a particular day, by the number of fans on that day, and finally by the number of posts published that day. The final Engagement Rate figure is multiplied by 100 and should be displayed as a percentage.
  

• The Engagement Rate for a date range should be calculated as the average of all daily Engagement Rate values for all days that are being examined.
  
  

So, What's the Difference Between Both Engagement Rate Metrics - In a Nutshell?

Both metrics have different ways to aggregate data:  

• Flexible Widgets - Calculate the average Engagement Rate of the individual post just once, for a set of posts examined - Post Level.
  
• Socialbakers API - Calculates the daily average value of the metric (for a profile) and then calculates the average from the daily values for a time period - Profile Level.

With this in mind – decide what’s the best way for your team or organization to measure engagement, track your content performance, and you can focus on the fun part: creating engaging content.