Don’t count social media followers, measure engagement rate

Look, social media is important for business, we all know that. But being on the right platforms is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s becoming increasingly important to be able to analyse and understand how your brand is performing on social media. Socialbakers, a global social media and digital analytics company, recently released a timely infographic, that addresses the issue of engagement with social media.

According to the company: “Because social media involves a great deal of human interaction in its entire complexity, aggregating results to just one digit would be grossly inaccurate and frankly impossible.” As social media gathers pace, it seems that a far more sophisticated measuring approach is required.

Social success is determined by five factors:

• Fan growth
• Posts from you
• Your fans interactions
• Your users’ wall posts
• The speed of your response

Taken together, these five factors give a balanced and objective view of how well a brand is doing in the rapidly shifting world of social media. These methods of analysis are critical to look at, not only for your brand, but also to help you analyse how well your competitors are doing.

In the work that it does for its clients, Socialbakers makes use of a calculation that it calls Engagement Rate. The calculation involves adding up the number of interactions divided by the total number of fans and multiplying that by 100. So in the case of Facebook it’s the number of likes + comments + shares + posts on a given day, divided by the number of fans. With Twitter it would be tweets + retweets + replies divided by the number of followers x 100.

Socialbakers took this engagement rate calculation and applied it to a number of global brands in the month between the 10th of June and July. What they found was that far and away, the most engaged brand was AUDI USA with a score of 0.7%, which far outstripped the next brand, Mercedes-Benz at 0.306%.

Interestingly, during this period of study, Mercedes-Benz had 2.3-million more fans than Audi did (7.8-million as compared to 5.5-million). Normally one would assume that with two million more people interacting with your brand, your engagement would be much higher. But Socialbakers’ formula shows that to be not true and gives a firm endorsement of the strategy that Audi is using, in terms of engaging with customers on a daily basis.

The engagement analysis is a handy way of measuring the effectiveness of what your online brand is doing and it negates the pressure on social media professionals to simply grow the numbers on their page. While a huge following was previously seen as the holy grail of social media, it makes far more sense to use a set of tools that can help effectively measure how well the fans are being treated, how much activity there is and how regularly fans, who are potential customers, interact with the brand.