What is er post. Opinions: Engagement Rate metric and its meaning

For some time, the effectiveness of social media for business was determined by the number of subscribers. These and other absolute indicators expressed the “power” of the account. The more users subscribe to community or channel updates, the better. But at a certain point the question was asked: “What is the use of a huge subscriber base?”

Often those dedicated to selling goods or providing services experience negative economies of scale - this is a textbook example. It turns out that 40 thousand subscribers are simply lost in the feed due to the mass of posts from many similar online points of sale. Also often their incentive to subscribe is a one-time interest or promotion. After some time, business account owners are left alone with a gigantic subscription base that does not express any interest in the product - users simply glance at the next one and scroll further.

A similar fate can befall groups and channels on any social networks: Facebook, YouTube. Users are nominally subscribers, but the priority of the community for them is extremely low, and therefore they practically do not take part in its activity. With calls on the site it is somewhat simpler - you can connect anti-fraud and understand who is the target and who is just a fraud.

The situation is made worse when most people have an algorithmic feed running that displays community updates based on their current popularity with users. Those who instantly receive a large number of reactions reach the top, while less popular groups and publications generally remain without a chance to rise in the search results.

To solve this problem, you will have to be proactive, creating a subscriber base that is interested in interacting with the content. Even a small community will benefit if posts generate reactions and movement very quickly. Then the posts of the public or group will not be lowered in the search results, but will appear in the feeds of more users.

Owners of groups and business accounts are faced with the question of bringing subscribers into an active state - they should benefit the community, and not lie as a dead weight. Benefit is interest, attention, or, more precisely, involvement.

Involvement is measured by a specific metric - Engagement Rate or Involvement Coefficient. ER is essentially the percentage of targeted user actions per post, time period, or per user.

For the first time the indicator wassuggested by marketers at Social Bakers in 2013. Experts relied on the idea that absolute indicators do not provide valuable information, and with a smaller number of subscribers, one community can work many times more efficiently and more profitably than another, with a much larger base.

There are different target actions that are taken into account when calculating the Engagement Rate:

• Likes
• Reposts
• Comments
• Clicks

They can be considered separately or together depending on marketers' goals.

As a result, you do not receive empty data on the number of subscribers, but valuable information. Involvement makes it clear whether there is demand for your product, even if the product is informational, how it is expressed and how to spur it.

How to calculate Engagement Rate

There are two approaches to calculating the Engagement Rate:

• Based on number of subscribers
• Based on reach (users who saw the post)

The coverage approach is preferred by many professionals. Practical data should give an idea of ​​how much the publication interested the audience in contact with it. The share of subscribers who actually interact with a publication often does not exceed 10-20%. At the same time, going beyond the source, the post can be visible to many users who are not members of the community. The resulting metric based on the subscriber base reflects the attitude of only a small part of subscribers and does not take into account the reactions of third-party users who also interacted with the post.

To avoid incorrect results, it is wise to take into account not the number of subscribers, but the number of users reached. Then the quality of the posted publication will be clear - whether it attracts attention, whether it arouses interest among those who see it.

At the same time, in some cases, calculating based on the subscriber base is not a mistake if it is necessary to assess the level of involvement of the existing audience within the community. This is how the quality of the subscription base itself is tested - how actively it reacts and pays attention to the content.

Already based on these approaches, several methods for calculating the coefficient of involvement are being built.

Formulas and values ​​of indicators

1. ER by number of users

The sum of reactions includes all likes, shares and comments. This determines the degree of user participation in the discussion and distribution of content, and its evaluation.

The big disadvantage of this broad, vague approach is that it does not take into account any time period or specific post.

The above formulas can only be useful as a basic example for understanding the essence of the ER indicator. They can also be used for a first assessment of the community, as a top-down view. If you want to understand the general quality characteristics of a new public page or channel, you can calculate ER for all time for all materials. The result will be an aggregated score reflecting the overall engagement of all subscribers or once reached users.

1. ER by number of posts

Measuring engagement rates on individual posts is a more serious means of filtering content. By calculating ER for a separate post, you determine the interest of users specifically in this message, and probe the audience’s interest in the topic.

If engagement on a post topic systematically exceeds the average rate calculated for the community, we can say that the topic hit the target. By creating content based on it, you can significantly increase the level of audience loyalty and attract new subscribers.

It's also useful to look at the difference between base and reach metrics. You cannot compare these metrics with each other - the coefficient for subscribers will be systematically lower.

For example, if your public has 1000 subscribers and the post received 10 likes, ER = 1%. At the same time, the publication could only be seen by 100 users, 40 of whom are not members of the public. The last fact is unimportant, but it gives a more complete picture. Accordingly, the coverage ER would be 10%, and this difference shows that it is inappropriate to compare the two approaches directly.

Therefore, it is reasonable to assess how much each type of ER, in terms of reach and base, exceeds or lags behind the average for the selected audience segment. For example, the ER of a specific post in terms of reach will be 40% higher than the ER of the average post in terms of reach, and for a subscriber base the same excess will be 10%. Accordingly, the surge in reaction among reached users exceeds the positive reaction among subscribers.

A more significant positive difference for the base will indicate that you have an audience in your community with more or less homogeneous interest in this topic. This theme can be used to consolidate the image of the community and user activity.

If the indicator is higher for external users, it is worth deciding on the goals of community development. The result may indicate that subscribers react poorly to the message. If they are valuable in their current composition, it is better to protect them from such content in the future. If the core of your subscriber base has not yet formed and its current composition is not important to you, a high ER in terms of coverage indicates the possibility of attracting new users through this topic.

1. ER by time interval

We come to the classic formula, derived directly from Social Bakers. Two fundamental Engagement Rates - average daily ER per post and daily ER - provide a basic understanding of the quality of posts on a particular day, as well as direction for a comprehensive analysis of engagement in many dimensions.

Social Bakers ER reflects how your audience, followers, or reached users responded overall to posts on a given day, and how that reaction is measured on average per post.

The formula can be extrapolated to any period of time of interest and evaluate user reactions to posts for a month or for the duration of the promotion.

1. Special ER

In addition to the above formulas, specific calculations are used that take into account additional parameters. Thus, certain marketing activities require taking into account any clicks in addition to generally accepted reactions.

In some cases, it is necessary to evaluate all reactions of an individual user as one unique one - this allows you to more accurately determine engagement.

Also, sometimes different reactions are assigned their own weights - multipliers for variables. For certain campaigns, a repost is twice as likely to lead to a sale, and therefore the number of reposts is multiplied by a factor of “2”. There can be many options.

What ER is considered normal?

It is rarely possible to say with certainty that one ER is high and another is low. This indicator varies - it is influenced by the composition of the audience, the properties of the product, the social network itself, the time of day and other factors.

However, there are rough guidelines offered by professionals. For example, according to Scrunch , the engagement rate for Instagram, derived as the ratio of all reactions to posts over the last 30 days to the number of posts and the number of subscribers, is subject to the following gradation:

• Less than 1%- low rate
• From 1% to 3.5%- average
• From 3.5% to 6% - high rate
• Over 6%- very high rate

How to increase your engagement rate

The engagement rate determines the accuracy of audience selection and the quality of materials. At the same time, ER can be “tightened up” using several techniques:

• Choose the optimal posting time. Study the heat map of public visit times and use it to post on certain days and times.
• Use graphics - they dilute the bland text and attract attention.
• Don't neglect communication. Subscribers appreciate communication and answers to questions.

Arguments for and against ER

The engagement rate is good, but it can be very far from reality. This is an abstraction that does not answer a number of questions.

It is often unclear how the Engagement Rate relates to actual conversions and sales if the community is dedicated to the product. At the same time, it may coincide that high involvement will be provided by an audience that is not relevant to the product. Yes, they lively discuss the global agenda that you propose in publications, but this does not affect conversions in any way.

In the end, you have to seriously try to correlate the dynamics of sales and engagement chronologically to establish a relationship. In any case, you can calculate this indicator in the Calltouch service.

When using Engagement Rate in analytics, remember all the nuances and do not place hopes on this indicator that it physically cannot justify.

There can be a lot of options for calculating ER, it all depends only on your imagination. The most popular option is ER per post - average engagement per post. Typically her formula for Instagram looks like this:

ER = likes + comments + saves / followers *100%

In this case, we will calculate the engagement on one specific post, however, such an approach to assessing the quality of content and account followers is unrepresentative, so usually likes and comments are collected from the last 10-20 posts.

There is a second important point, which is not really talked about out loud yet. Each social network has introduced an algorithmic feed, as well as promotion of posts directly into the user feed. What does this mean for us?

I came up with simple math for myself: the average reach of a good profile is usually from 30 to 50% of the number of subscribers.

Yes, every third or fourth post can also shoot at the recommended one with a set of three times or more coverage, but we are talking about the usual situation. With these 30-50% of users reached, an average of 5-10% will like the profile. Video views typically account for 50% of the users reached.

*If the situation in your unique account is different from the one described above, then I am happy for you. Or I grieve if everything is worse. But this is the average picture.

Another thing I like about the service is that it provides average values. Here is a screenshot from my personal Instagram profile of me having fun.

Registration in 1.4 times more than similar sized accounts makes me happy.

What reduces user engagement?

We are done with the real facts and are moving into the territory of speculation, theories and myths.

There are 2 main factors for decreasing engagement on Instagram profiles:

• Decrease in the quality of the profile audience (for example, boost from bots, a large number of mass followers who simply do not see your content).
• Your content has become worse in quality or has become boring to your subscribers.

There are a lot of additional problems: for example, you incorrectly cleared your profile of bots (), chose the wrong time to publish, stopped writing texts and asking questions.

From myths and theories I also know:

• Abusing other users' tags in posts.
• Abuse of mass following (a wild myth, but I haven’t had time to refute it yet).
• The same hashtags under each post.
• Abuse of text in photographs.
• The use of memes and popular images from the network, which are identified by the algorithm as “bayans”.

And many others. I recently heard that there was unrest in some Insta-parties because of LikeTimes. Instagram began identifying LT participants through direct chats and sharply reducing their reach. As for me, it’s nonsense, but there are so many things that happen in life. Oh - here.

But not once have I heard a story that SFS can somehow kill your ER.

Most likely, SFS is no longer fashionable, and too frequent SFS with opaque conditions for selecting “winners” can primarily negatively affect the attitude of your subscribers towards you, and this can lead to their “passive observation” of your content.

To get greater coverage, you should pay attention to the content itself.

I have a long article about how to get more comments on Instagram on an ongoing basis; I don’t see the point in duplicating it, so you can read it.

I love to use two posts from the same profile as an example. A post without text and a question in the first case, and a post with a small text and a vote in the second. Same audience, same profile, no additional changes.

So, what is post-voting, and what should you use to prepare it? Everything is simple here: we offer our subscribers a choice between something and something. Easy, isn't it? If you are a business representative, you can offer to choose a product or service that will be discounted all week; if you are a blogger, show your imagination.

Even well-worn topics like tea or coffee for breakfast can spark conversation, thereby increasing your reach.

It is better to start working on increasing ER using the following algorithm:

• Determine the current situation. Find out if it needs improvement.
• Explore your profile. Who and where are your subscribers from, are there many bots and mass followers among them, what time do you publish content, look at the coverage of your posts and objectively look at the published content or ask for help from third-party specialists for an objective assessment.
• Understand where the problem is: Small reach or small ER relative to reach. Move towards solving this problem
• Experiment :) Next up is terra incognita
• And of course read looking for new cool ideas.

As you know, engagement on Instagram affects the ranking of posts in the feed. The higher the engagement, the higher your posts appear. The higher they are, the more users will see them.

In this article we will tell you how to calculate engagement on Instagram and how you can increase your ER. Many of the tips can be implemented within 10-15 minutes.

What is ER on Instagram and what indicator can be considered good?

The abbreviation ER stands for Engagement Rate and is translated as engagement coefficient. The indicator is calculated as a percentage and serves as an indicator of audience activity on the Instagram page.

In simple terms, how actively your subscribers and the audience you reach react to your posts. An active reaction is considered to be:

• like;
• a comment;
• repost;
• saving the post to bookmarks.

At the same time, there is no exact value for what ER indicator can be considered good. It all depends on the size of the audience. For an account with up to 10,000 subscribers, an ER of 10% would be good; for a page with an audience of more than 1,000,000, 1% would be normal. It is also worth considering whether the account is commercial or personal. Commercial pages have correspondingly lower engagement.

How to calculate ER on Instagram

There are 2 calculation methods: based on the number of followers (ER) and based on the reach of the publication ( ERViews - Engagement Rate Views). When analyzing the effectiveness of promotion on Instagram, both indicators should be taken into account.

E.R. It is calculated as the ratio of the average number of all interactions on posts to the number of subscribers over a certain period of time. It is important to count to understand the loyalty of your subscribers. The downside is that the reaction of other users who saw the publication is not taken into account.

• Calculation example: in a month on an account with 1000 subscribers, we published 30 posts, which received a total of 2000 likes and 100 comments. It turns out 2000+100/30 = 70 reactions to the post. Accordingly, ER, 70 reactions per post/1000 subscribers * 100% = 7% .

ERViews. It is calculated in the same way as ER, only instead of the number of subscribers, the average reach for one post is taken. Shows the level of interest of all the audience who saw the post. Including hashtags, recommendations, etc.

• Calculation example: Same input as in the example above. The average reach of each post is 500 unique users. It turns out ERViews = 70 reactions per post/500 average post coverage * 100% = 14% .

How to increase impressions and engagement on Instagram

Ask for feedback

Subscribers appreciate it when their opinions are taken into account. Especially if leaving a comment does not require spending a lot of time and studying additional information. Ask simple questions directly in posts, for example:

• Ask if it's worth running a promotion with discounts, or if it's better to give small souvenirs instead
• Find out what subscribers think about the latest sensational event
• Describe the situation in detail and ask for advice
• Ask any topical question - for example, ask how subscribers feel about sex on the first date or what was the first thing they saw this morning

Select the type of feedback based on the features of your account. For example, a question about attitudes towards a certain event would be appropriate for a blogger, and a survey about a promotion would be appropriate for small business accounts.

This is how you can ask subscribers to give feedback

Run a comment contest

If you have something to offer your subscribers as a prize, hold a comment contest. Its mechanics are extremely simple: everyone who left a comment under a certain post participates in the drawing, and the winner can be chosen at random or using special applications - for example, the serviceGiveaway.

To maximize engagement, you can ask users not only to write a comment, but also to like or follow the account. A good way to increase your reach is to ask contest participants to tag two of their friends in the comments under the post.

The conditions and mechanics of the competition are well defined here.

Hold a competition for the most active subscriber

Being active is more difficult than leaving a short comment or answer to a question in a post. Therefore, the prizes in such a competition should be more serious than in a regular drawing: for example, give the most active subscriber a 50-70% discount, jewelry or a travel certificate. The more valuable the prize, the more active the participants will be.

Activity can be expressed in different ways. For example, ask subscribers:

• Like
• Leave comments
• Tag friends in the comments

Clearly state by what indicator the winner will be chosen - for example, the winner will be the one who left the most likes or scored the most points in total. And special services will help you see accurate statistics, for example -Giweawation.

Example of an activity competition

Find the perfect time to post

Just publish posts at the right time - then a large number of subscribers will see them, which means the likelihood of getting likes and comments will increase significantly. You can calculate the right time yourself - to do this, look at posts for a week, month or year, and collect statistics.

Or take a simpler route - use special services, for example,Popsters. It shows the success of a post made at a certain time in relation to all posts. Generates the result as a percentage and builds a schedule of successful times for releasing new posts.

The most successful time in the example under consideration is 20:00 hours

Get rid of bots

The engagement rate on Instagram is formed based on statistics on all followers of your account. To increase ER, you can simply get rid of those who spoil the statistics - bots and inactive accounts. You can find them manually, but this will take a lot of time, or using services:

• SpamGuard;
• Instaplus.pro;
• SocialKit.ru;
• OneMillionLikes.

Using the same services, you can remove inactive subscribers, bots and mass followers from the list. But we recommend doing this in several stages, clearing your account of inactive users gradually. If you remove all bots at once, your organic reach may drop significantly.

This is what creating a cleaning task looks like in Instaplus

Announce posts in Stories

Instagram stories are published at the top of the feed, so they receive more views compared to regular posts. You can attract the attention of subscribers by publishing in Stories, namely, by announcing the upcoming post. For example, tell your story that you will be posting soon with:

• Description of a new product or service;
• Drawing of valuable prizes;
• Own research;
• Useful infographics.

The main thing is that the upcoming post is useful to the target audience. Then your subscribers will follow updates in your account, which means your engagement rate will increase.

Announcement example

Provoke discussions

Bring up the “hype” topic that is being discussed. Ask your subscribers for their opinions and enjoy the results in the comments. For example, you can cover a high-profile political news story or discuss a bill that has created a stir in the media. You can also use regional news that has caused public outcry.

The account owner played well on the topic under discussion - the 2018 Presidential elections

Hold a flash mob

A flash mob in its pure form will not help increase engagement on Instagram. In order for people to visit your account, like and leave comments, you need to ask the flash mob participants to mention the link to your account in the post. Then many of its participants, being your th target audience, they will go to your profile, perhaps subscribe and like. This will increase your ER in the short term, and our other tips will help you keep it at a high level.

Depending on the specifics of your account, you can come up with different ideas for a flash mob, for example, ask participants to:

• Find an original way to use your product, photograph it in action and post the photo
• Create a simple picture mentioning your company in any editor and pass the baton to several friends
• Ask them to share why followers follow any of their friends, and pass the baton to the next participant

The mechanics of a flash mob are quite complex. You will have to think about how you can attract subscribers so that they want to start the relay race, and how you can attract followers and increase ER through publications.

Flash mob from Oriflame gained more than 2,000 participants

So what can you do to increase ER:

• Ask for feedback - an answer to a question, a story about a product, an opinion about a situation;
• Hold a comment competition;
• Hold a competition for the most active subscriber;
• Find the ideal time to post using Instagram statistics or third-party services;
• Get rid of bots manually or using special services;
• Announce upcoming useful or interesting posts in Stories;
• Provoke discussion with a “hype” topic;
• Hold a flash mob.

How do you work with the engagement rate and does it help you increase your organic reach and attract new subscribers? Share your opinion in the comments - we are very interested!

So, you have created a Twitter profile for your company, a group on Facebook and VKontakte is also in action. You answer (are you answering?) questions from your potential customers, use scheduled publishing services to post content on social networks at the ideal time, follow your target audience on Twitter to get 8-15% of the coveted return subscriptions, thank your fans for their support.

But beyond that, what are you doing to track the effectiveness of your social media activities and increase traffic and sales? If you engage your audience on social media, you must be able to calculate the end result. How else will you understand whether you are working in the right direction and whether your target audience wants to hear you and interact with you?

It sounds hard, but calculating social media marketing performance metrics is easier than it seems, with metrics like engagement rate, Reach and Follower Growth, Acquisition, and associative and direct conversions ( Assisted and Direct Conversion).

Measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing

Engagement rate

Let's start with the well-known engagement rate. To understand whether your content is interesting to your audience, you can track engagement metrics such as the number comments (conversation), approval or number of likes (applause), number of reposts (amplification). These metrics show the total amount of activity on your social media accounts. Do they mean anything on their own?

Considering separately the number of likes, reposts, comments, as well as the number of subscribers, one may encounter a misleading “theater of success”, in which the growth of individual metrics (from the number of likes to the number of subscribers and registrations) is considered as an undoubted indicator of the effectiveness of marketing on social networks. In reality, these indicators, isolated from other data, do not affect anything other than the WOW effect.

In turn, the total number of these metrics (volume) can be used to calculate more important metrics: engagement rate and (in some cases) cost of engagement.

The engagement rate answers two main questions:

• How relevant and interesting is the content you publish?
• Are you communicating with the people who really want to hear from you?

Depending on the final information you want to obtain, you can calculate your audience engagement by dividing the total number of likes, shares and comments over a certain period by the total reach, number of subscribers:

Engagement / Overall Reach

Calculating engagement rates based on the reach of your posts (both among subscribers and third-party audiences) is great for assessing the quality of content, but may no longer adequately reflect the situation as your reach increases significantly.

Engagement / Followers on a specific date

This method of calculation gives you a relatively stable indicator as a result, which allows you to assess how involved your already established audience is. By calculating it by day and presenting the results in a graph (you can monitor the changes in the SMM service KUKU.io), you can evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing recently and, by changing and supplementing it, monitor the growth or decline of engagement.

A formula that you have probably already come across:

The engagement rate can be calculated for paid campaigns by dividing the resulting engagement by the number of post views for a particular post, divided by the number of posts for a particular day. There are other ways depending on your goals.

At this stage, paid social media campaigns (promotion of individual publications) can also be assessed cost of engagement (volume of engagement / funds spent). But is this assessment important if you can calculate the cost of a new subscriber who came from this campaign, as well as his conversion to the final goal - registration/purchase, etc.? Most likely, this assessment will be of interest only to the advertising agency and its clients (correct in the comments if wrong).

The engagement rate is influenced primarily by content, which you publish, time, in which you publish, audience understanding, which you are aiming at.

The growth in the number of subscribers also affects the final percentage of engagement, but often not in the direction you might expect. With each new subscriber, the overall profile of your audience changes, and dividing engagement by increased number of subscribers and reach, we get a smaller end result. These indicators should be considered together.

Reach and Follower Growth

Most companies make their presence on social networks their main goal. lead generation. But let's start from the very beginning. In order to start driving traffic from social networks to your website or making sales right away, you need (engaged) subscribers And coverage.

Reach refers to the number of unique users who saw your content. Reach affects everything: engagement, likes, comments, clicks, feedback, engagement.

Coverage can be like certain publication, and yours pages in general. Why is it important to separate? By publishing once a week, your post may get a lot of reach, but your page reach will be extremely low. If you post too often (say 5 times a day), the low reach of individual posts will be offset by the high reach of your page. Should we go to the extreme? Of course, it is best to find a middle ground.

On Facebook, reach is also divided into organic(people who saw your post in their feed), viral(the user’s friends saw the post in their feed when the user commented on the post or shared it), paid(coverage of promoted posts).

One of the trends in recent years is the rapid decline in organic reach on Facebook. And it seems to me that the English definition of what is happening on Facebook is incredibly accurate: “pay-to-play” (“pay to play”).

Favorite. Potential Reach. Unfortunately, the potential reach offered by social networks is beautiful numbers, divorced from reality. You can post super-viral event content, but you won't come close to the impressive numbers that social media touts for you. Your audience growth and engagement metrics, while not as glamorous, are a more realistic measure of your potential reach.

To assess potential coverage outside of your subscribers and increasing your audience you can start by counting the number of friends of your engaged followers, the audience estimate of your competitors, and the count of engaged users who are not yet your followers. Reinforce the information received by segmenting users by engagement and geography, compare the portraits of old subscribers and new ones.

By identifying and studying the main groups you need to influence, you can independently evaluate potential reach and create your own truly effective list of growth hacks for social networks.

Attracting clients (Acquisition)

Despite the fact that user traffic from social networks in most cases is significantly inferior to organic traffic from search engines, the percentage of repeat visits from social networks is several times higher than that of Google. You can check this in Google Analytics right now.

When talking about attracting users from social networks, it’s impossible not to start with frequency of transitions to your site. The metric divides visits to your site into two main categories: new And repeated. While repeat clicks reflect the effectiveness of your social media content and audience engagement, new clicks show whether by increasing your “reach” you are actually getting more clicks.

What can influence user acquisition from social networks? Of course, first of all, this content, which you publish, and then, how do you interact with your audience.

Among the many strategies for increasing conversions from social networks, I find especially interesting:

Twitter.

Participate in Twitter chats. Twitter chats are a great way to interact with a large number of people at once who are (or might be) interested in your product. The more you participate in Twitter chats, the more you will be recognized. Also you can use chats to promote your blog articles, relevant to the chat topic. you can find a large list of popular chat rooms.

Influence on opinion leaders. Identify influential people in your industry and people who frequently mention keywords you're interested in and add them to private Twitter lists. Contact 2-3 people on your list per day. In this case, the tweets do not necessarily have to be related to your brand and can cover related topics. If you still want to post links to your site without looking like a spammer, try linking to useful content on your blog.

Facebook and Vkontakte.

80% of users social media prefer to communicate with brands through Facebook and VKontakte. Why? Because it's faster than via email. 50% expect to receive support on social media, and only 23% of brands with a social media presence actually provide it. You've probably heard that the experience of poor support spreads very quickly. But fortunately, positive experiences spread very quickly, too, word of mouth works. Users want to communicate with you through social networks, so give them this opportunity.

For LinkedIn the main attraction strategies can be searching and meeting influential people, participation in group discussions, repost your blog articles etc..

All social media engagement strategies are truly worthy of their own column. But I would like to return to evaluating effectiveness. Will you take the quality of the relationships being built as a criterion? No. When talking about efficiency and ROI, you compare money and time spent with specific goals achieved.

Because any relationship built with an audience on social networks is useless without conversion. So if you decide to measure referral traffic from social networks, take it a step further and measure the final conversion in registration or purchase.

Direct and associated conversion (Conversion)

Let's start this block with the four main ways social media users can come to your website:

1. Social network > Direct link to the site
2. Social network > Blog article with a link to the main page > Lead
3. Social network > Gated content (in order to get to an article or download something, you need to log in or leave information about yourself) > Lead
4. Social network > Blog article > Registration form posted on the blog

The paths are different and not all will instantly lead to the desired effect - registration, sale, etc.. Before attracting users to your site and making them return, you must clearly define your end goal: what kind of conversion do you want to see into sales or other desired actions?

At the same time, you need to decide for yourself that transitions and conversion will not be achieved solely by selling posts, because constantly posting such content is the surest way to lose your audience.

Begin You can calculate conversion from the last click, clicks from social networks via your links, attaching UTM tags to them. But direct clicks don't tell the full story of how effectively you're building relationships and creating a loyal audience for your brand on social media.

Most of your posts and tweets won't get you a sale, but you can close your target with potential customers who visit your site again. At this moment there appear Google Analytics Assisted Conversions:

Assisted conversions occur when a user visits your site, then leaves without converting, but then returns and completes the conversion. The higher these values, the more contribution the social network makes.

By comparing Assisted Conversions to Google Analytics Last Click Conversions, you can determine which social networks are ideal for maintaining relationships with existing customers and which ones are ideal for generating and generating new business.

So, when you know and are able to calculate these indicators, the activity of your subscribers on social networks ceases to be an ephemeral indicator of effectiveness, the “theater of success”, and becomes the basis for calculating engagement and ROI, assessing the quality of incoming traffic, as well as the effectiveness of your content marketing.

ER ( Engagement Rate - level of interaction ) is an indicator that reflects the level of audience interaction with your publications. The higher the ER, the more interesting the posts are to your subscribers and they express this in the form of likes and comments. Simply put, if you have 20,000 subscribers and posts get 20-30 likes, this is not good.

In this material, we will talk about what formula for calculating ER to use, tell you what the engagement indicator affects, and share recommendations for improving it.

Formula for calculating ER

For different social networks, ER can and should be calculated differently. And on Instagram there are many formulas for calculating ER. Therefore, it is incorrect to compare the ER indicators of different services, since they may use different algorithms.

Let us describe several basic approaches to calculating ER.

One of the most popular approaches is to calculate ER per post. Or the average level of engagement per post. The formula looks like this:

ER = (likes + comments) / subscribers * 100%.

For example, you have 1000 subscribers, and your last post received 90 likes and 10 comments. It turns out, ER = (90 + 10) / 1000 * 100% = 10%. Accordingly, to calculate the ER of the entire account, you need to add up the ER for each post and divide by the total number of posts. Most often, not all posts are taken into account, but the last 10-20 or all posts for the last month.

The data is visible under each post for those who switched to .

Another formula that is popular when calculating ER, instead of the number of subscribers, takes into account the reach that the post received.

ER = (likes + comments) / reach per post * 100%.

This method of calculation can be considered more accurate, since not all subscribers see new publications, and the coverage reflects exactly those who did. For example, with all the same indicators as in the previous example, we will not divide by 1000 subscribers, but by coverage, let’s say it was 400. It turns out, ER = (90 + 10) / 400 * 100% = 25%. Even for 1000 subscribers this is a very high figure. With further account growth, the indicator will decrease and this is normal.

What ER is considered normal?

The more subscribers, the lower the ER and this is, in principle, a normal phenomenon. All this happens due to the fact that Instagram purposefully pessimizes posts so that users are motivated to launch . It is possible that profiles that are transferred to a business account, which indicates a clear commercial component, receive pessimization to an even greater extent (but this is not certain).

But here one more factor needs to be taken into account - the level of reach of the audience. It can be roughly divided into 4 groups:

• users with no more than 500 subscriptions. They see your publications more often than others;
• subscribers with the number of subscriptions from 500 to 1000. Sometimes they can see your publications;
• the number of subscriptions a user has is from 1000 to 2000. You will be very lucky if your publication is noticed;
• more than 2000. As a rule, these are business accounts that have subscribed to you using mass following. They don't watch their feed at all. If there is no mutual subscription, they will be deleted later.

It turns out that the more subscribers you have of users with a small number of outgoing subscriptions, the higher the quality of your audience and the more often they will see your posts. Related article: .

Based on this, accounts with different subscription bases will have different ER indicators (calculated according to the second principle). For example, for an account with 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers, the normal figure is 10-20%; for accounts with over 10,000 subscribers, this figure usually drops to 5%; anything over 100,000 is 3%; and accounts with millions of subscribers are down to 1%.

Again, these indicators should not be considered as the ultimate truth. Instagram is changing very rapidly, so the algorithms are changing, and each account is a separate case that needs to be considered individually.

How to increase ER

We need to act in this direction by improving the quality of content and the quality of the audience. But again, there is no single algorithm by which ER can be increased; each situation is individual in its own way. Here is a list of basic recommendations:

• Assess your current situation. Check what your ER indicator is now, whether you or the agency that guides you are doing it to increase likes on posts, how many bots you have in your subscribers, how often you publish new content.
• Identify the problem: low coverage or low ER relative to coverage.
• Experiment with new content - try different options. Try to take photos that you want to discuss, write text so that it evokes a response.
• . Follow the link to find out how to do this using the SocialKit program.
• Gathering a target audience on Instagram - gather the hottest and most active audience who likes to like and comment and start boosting followers on them. Filter out those who are unlikely to see your posts (exclude those with more than 1000 outgoing subscriptions).
• Don't use the same hashtags on different posts.
• Use only original content - the one you create yourself. You should not copy both images and text. The same applies to reposts from public pages.
• Do not place text on the photo. Even in advertising, Instagram will show posts with text on the image to a smaller number of audiences, not to mention organic.

And most importantly, read our blog and use the SocialKit program for working on Instagram.