What is Engagement Rate and Why is it Important in Influencer Marketing?
Engagement rate in influencer marketing is used to measure the level of interaction an influencer typically receives on their content. Simply put, it is the percentage of the influencer’s audience that responds to their content.
What’s classified as an ‘engagement’?
Here are some examples of what are considered engagements (or interactions):
Post Likes or Reactions
Shares
Views
Comments
Why is engagement rate important?
Engagement rate is an important metric (if not the most important) as it can assist in determining which influencers you should work with based on how their content performs across different platforms. Analysing an influencer’s engagement rate can also help you decide whether the influencer will deliver you a return on investment (R.O.I), as it indicates how responsive their audience is to their content.
An influencer’s engagement rate can also be used to set a benchmark to determine success or failure for your influencer marketing campaign. For instance, if the influencer shares content about your brand that has significantly higher level of engagement than their usual engagement rate, this could indicate that the campaign was very successful. Whereas, if it has a significantly lower engagement rate than their typical rate, this could indicate that there is a problem with the content that may need to be addressed.
Engagement rate is MORE important than reach
Here’s an example: You decide to run a campaign and prepare a brief for a range of influencers. An influencer with 200,000 followers may charge you USD$2,000per post. This influencer has an engagement rate of 1.5%. This means you will receive approximately 3,000 interactions per post at a cost of $0.67 per engagement.
Whereas, an influencer with only 10,000 followers may charge you USD$750 per post but have a high level of engagement at 18.5%. This means you should expect to receive approximately 1,850 interactions at an average cost of only $0.40 per engagement. That is a lot cheaper!
In this example, it would be significantly more cost effective and potentially deliver better R.O.I to work with influencers who have less reach, but better engagement and make a stronger impact on their audience. This is the essence of why engagement rate is often a more important than reach.
Influencer engagement rates on different platforms
It’s important to remember that an influencer’s engagement rate will often differ from platform to platform. For example, a food blogger might receive high engagement on Instagram, low engagement on Facebook and very high engagement on their blog. Armed with this information, it will be much easier to decide which influencers to collaborate with and on what platforms you’d like them to share content about your brand.
