In addition to being a cool Pink Floyd song…this is an excellent question if you’re a business on social media. 

If you have a page for your business and you’ve been posting content, you might be wondering if it’s working. 

Is anyone really seeing what I’m posting and how does it compare to other pages that post? It’s a great question because it means you care. 

A lot of businesses just keep posting day after day with the same content and don’t look to see if their posts are resonating.

Or maybe you’re just not sure how to know IF it is or it isn’t working. 

Because social media is, well, social…your go-to place is to check your engagement. 

Why Engagement?

If people aren’t engaging with your posts, it’s a clear sign that what you’re putting out there isn’t working.

Engagement is any activity someone takes on your page or posts in the form of a comment or a like, a share. 

It can also be checking your location, viewing your profile, or tagging you in a post. Or on Instagram it can include a save. 

What I like to look at though is Engagement Rate. 

Engagement is the sum total of all activity and Engagement Rate (ER) takes that a step further on how it relates to your followers. 

This gives you a benchmark so you can see what posts are getting the best engagement and how your engagement compares with the average of the platform you’re using. 

It’s like a report card for your social media. 

If you’re curious, you could also dig deeper to figure out what engagement rates are for your industry but this is a very simple first step! 

Keep it simple!

For now, for purposes of keeping it simple, let’s just use likes, comments and shares. 

The way to calculate your engagement rate is: 

Add up your engagements for a post (comments + likes + shares/or retweets) and divide by the number of followers you have. 

When I do an audit for a new client, I like to do this for the last 20 posts to get a good snapshot. 

Example:

15 Engagements (likes, comments and shares)
Divide by 600 Followers
X      100
2.5% ER

Do this for your last 20 posts so you can see individual post performance but then you can average them together to get a sense of your overall ER. 

How do I know if this is good or bad?

It depends on the platform…

Averages by platform
Instagram = 3%
Facebook = 0.5%-0.99%
Twitter = 0.5% 

Anything below or above these averages is a good benchmark of how your posts are doing. 

If you’re measuring Instagram, 2.5% is below average.

If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, congrats! You’re doing really well! 

Okay, now what???

Whatever the results are, you should go back to your posts to see what’s working and what’s not. 

If something’s working…DO MORE OF THAT! Seriously! It’s that easy! 

If it’s not working…go back and see if there’s a post that did better than others…but it’s time to rethink your content, because what you’re posting isn’t resonating. 

Look at your copy…is your copy engaging? Are you using photos or videos? Are you only talking about your business or are you commenting/sharing other posts in the community. 

Start to experiment to see what works. 

And if you need help, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’d love to hear from you!

All the best,
Laurie