How To Measure An Influencer’s Engagement Rate (A Scientific Approach)
Here's how to determine what a good engagement rate is and how to calculate it
Now that we’ve defined what engagement rate is in influencer marketing we’re ready to dive into the
details and discuss how to measure an influencer’s engagement rate.
As mentioned in the previous article, engagement rate is an important metric as it can help to determine which influencers to work with based on how their content performs across different platforms.
It’s complicated
Here’s the bad news: Engagement Rate can be very complicated to measure accurately. Our technical team talks in-depth about Scrunch’s process for measuring engagment, but I’ll give you a more simplified breakdown of the process.
To calculate an influencer’s engagement rate, total the engagements (likes + comments + retweets etc) across all of the influencers posts on a particular profile (e.g. Instagram profile) then divide by the total number of followers and divide that by the number of posts (to get the per post average).
The equation
**Average Engagement Rate (%) Per Post = Total Engagement / Follower Counts / Number of Posts x 100 **
This process is then repeated across each of the influencer’s profiles (e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc) to give their engagement rate per post on each profile. It’s important to class the influencer’s engagement rate on each profile separately, as what’s considered to be a high, good or low engagement rate differs significantly across each social platform.
Defining what’s a good engagement rate, scientifically!
As well as what’s considered to be a “good” engagement rate differing dramatically from one social platform to the next, and your own research into this topic may have revealed a number of different opinions on what to consider “good” engagement.
As Scrunch, we wanted to answer this question scientifically and did so by using statistical percentile. Percentile is used understand how a single data point stacks up against an entire population. For example, a data point said to be in the "80th percentile" is at the point where 80% of the population falls below and therefore is in the top 20%.
We analyzed millions of data points to come up with average and above average engagement rates across each social platform. Our analysis showed that the average (i.e. 50th percentile) engagement rate on Twitter is only around 0.06%, and the 99th percentile (i.e. the top 1%) is only around 2.7%. You can compare this to Instagram, where our analysis showed that the average profile has an engagement of 2.7% and the top performing profiles have an engagement rate of a massive 17.8%.
As you can see, this is a very complex process that you probably don’t want to be doing manually using a spreadsheet (unless you’re some sort of mathematical wizard with plenty of spare time up your sleeve) so how can you make this process easier?
How can I easily measure an influencer’s engagement?
Get Scrunching! We’ve created convenient tags which rate an influencer’s profiles based on their engagement with one of the following: low, good, high, very high so you can easily search for and compare influencers by their rate of engagement, as well as understand which platforms the influencer performs best on.
