I’ve read through many articles talking about the importance of posting quality content on brands’ social media pages. “Content is King, but engagement is Queen and she rules the house”. I absolutely love this statement. Content might be the key factor for building a successful social media campaign but if there is no backing up from the customers it doesn’t serve the purpose. Combining content and engagement with the audience is very important . That’s the reason why brands should prioritize to get people engaged with the content on social media sites.
In this blog we shall see the most crucial social networking site Facebook, where our audience is somewhere among the 9.6 million users who sign in to their account at least once a day. Let’s first look at the ever-changing Facebook numbers
More than 1.26 billion registered users (1.19 billion of whom are active on a monthly basis)
- 350 million daily uploaded photos
- 4.75 billion average daily shared items
- 20 billion minutes of usage per day
We are now very certain that our audience is on Facebook but it is very important for us to reach and engage with these users to understand what they communicate. Facebook engagement metric will help you deliver better results for your strategies. Facebook has recently (not so recent though) added new features like the ability to reply for users comments on Facebook Page, inclusion of hashtags, graph search etc., shows that engagement is more important than before.
Calculating Engagement Score:
Three essentials signifying engagement for Facebook posts are Likes, Shares, Comments and Clicks. Aggregating Clicks data might not be possible if you don’t have access to Facebook metrics since Facebook API does not provide Clicks data publicly.
Engagement for a post is calculated adding total Likes, Shares, Comments for the respective post.
Engagement Score = Like + Shares + Comments
What Likes signify?
Likes indicate how well the content echoes with users.
Why comments are important?
While the number of comments is an important metric, it is critical to understand the tone of comments. It provides insight into how people feel about your content, products, or your overall brand.
What is Shares and how it can help?
The number of times people share your content, Shares can amplify content reach.
Engagement with your posts reflects three vital things:
- Ability to capture users’ attention
- Ability to create a connection with your content
- How many people see your posts
Engagement plays a major role in Facebook’s News feed algorithm, which determines which posts are displayed in and how many users you were able to reach. We all might have seen our friends Facebook status appear on our Timeline even if it was published two days ago, that’s because when someone engage, the actions they take appear in their timelines, making their connection with our friend visible to us and that builds awareness for the content posted.
User engagement with our posts impacts the ability to reach a larger audience. People who are engaging on our page are the most valuable audience segment.
Calculating Engagement rate:
Engagement rate is a metric that you can use to measure your effectiveness at engaging your audience. Engagement rate is the number of unique users who engaged with your content as a percentage of the number of users that were exposed to it
Engagement Rate = Total number of users who liked, commented, shared on your post / people saw your post (Total post reach)
Example:
500 unique users engaged with a given post and 1000 users saw the post
Engaged users = 500
Engagement rate = 50%
What if you don’t have access to Facebook insights?
We can calculate engagement rate by
Total Engagement (Likes + Comments + Shares) / Total page Likes
Example:
5,000 unique users engaged during a given period and 100,000 users liked your page
Engaged users = 5,000
Engagement rate = 5%
Often the first Facebook metric that marketers focus on is the number of fans for a Page or Reach. In my next blog i shall discuss about reach and impression in detail. Happiee reading, feel free to share your thoughts in comments section 
Social Media Listening & Insights 