Do you have a clue about what Facebook engagement rates you should be aiming for with your posts? You should.
Post likes are no longer a vanity metric. With the advent of Facebook Reactions, engagement rates can help you better understand how your content impacts your audience. So let’s start measuring them!
These social media experts will give you a range to look out for the next time you pull your social media analytics.
Charli Day, Charli Says
Charli Day, Statistically, anything over 1% is considered a good Facebook engagement rate so if you have 500 fans and receive 5 engagements you’re doing fine:)
Here is an example of one of my better posts which had 431 engagements — I have 26,000 fans so this is a rate of 1.7% which is excellent. This was probably due to using a trending hashtag, offering some useful tips which resonated with my fans, and asking a question to prompt action.
Amanda Webb, Spiderworking
Amanda Webb, I tend to benchmark against myself. My best posts get a 7-10% engagement rate so that’s what I’m always chasing. Video, live and pre-recorded seems to do well but it’s not always the case.
Some of my Facebook Live videos get great reach but only a 4% engagement rate.
This Live, shorter than my usual show broadcast from the hotel at Social Media Marketing World is my best performing post for engagement getting 10%.
This is interesting as I didn’t do my usual promotion on it and the reach is somewhat lower than my usual live broadcasts.
What’s interesting is that reach doesn’t always equal engagement. Facebook seems to like my image posts, pushing them out to more of my audience but they get few interactions. This makes me realize more than ever that a good Facebook engagement rate and a solid sales funnel are far more important than reach.
Loren Bartley, Impactiv8
Loren Bartley, A “good Facebook engagement” rate is a highly subjective metric that can vary significantly from page-to-page and even between posts on the same Page.
It’s much easier to get a high engagement rate if your business trains dogs, than it would be if you were an accounting firm. Because of this, I have some clients who regularly generate more than 10% engagement on their content, while I have others that get really excited when they get one or two engagements on a post.
Therefore, it’s important for a Page to set a baseline for their page, based on the level of engagement they have received in the past and then strive to exceed that figure each week, moving that baseline goal up each week as they do.
Another thing to consider is that it’s better to look at the weekly engagement rate, rather than a post-by-post engagement rate, as there are too many variables involved that could influence the results of a single post. Some of those variable include:
- The day of the week
- The time of day
- What you are trying to achieve with your post (e.g. entertain, educate, inspire or convince)
- The type of content being shared (e.g. image, video, link, text only) and whether or not Facebook is giving that type of content favorable reach in the newsfeed
- How quickly people start responding to your content, as people are more likely to engage if they see someone has already done so before them
Engagement is an important signal in Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm. Therefore businesses should strive to improve their engagement rate over time to increase the chances of the future content they post being seen by more people.
Any consensus on the elusive Facebook engagement rate?
If you’re getting engagement rates in the single digits — it’s OK. If you want reassurance on this, try the free Facebook Barometer tool. It will compare your Facebook engagement rate and other metrics against other similar pages.
When we compared our account to others with a similar fan count, we noticed that our engagement rate AND that of our competition was under 5%.
If you don’t need this tool right away, be sure to bookmark it for when you do!
Thanks to all the social media experts who took time out to discuss Facebook engagement rates with me. What would you like our experts to tackle in an upcoming post? Sound off in the comments!
