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How to calculate estimated reach on facebook


Facebook Post Reach Explained

Post updated in March 2022

You want your Facebook campaigns to generate brand awareness, leads, and sales. So, you need to reach as many people as possible with your content. 

Once you start tracking your reach, you’ll understand whether you’re getting a healthy amount of likes, comments, and shares in relation to how many people see your content. In addition, increasing your Facebook reach can boost your engagement. 

Though you know that reach is important, making sense of it can be complicated, as there are so many ways to measure and track reach.

Read on to learn all about Facebook reach—what it is, how to track it, and ways to increase it.

Find out how quintly can help you dive deep into Facebook analytics and measure the impact of your Facebook marketing using rich data insights.

What does reach mean on Facebook?

On Facebook, reach is the number of unique users who see your content, whether it’s displayed in their news feed, on your page, as a story, or in an ad.

You may have heard Facebook reach described as post reach or page reach. Post reach is the reach of a specific piece of content, whereas page reach is the number of people who view the page as a whole.

We can break Facebook reach down into a further three categories: organic, paid, and viral reach.

Facebook organic reach

Unfortunately, not all of your followers will see everything you post. Facebook’s algorithm presents a customized news feed for every user, based on that person’s past actions and interests. 

When your content naturally shows up in a follower’s news feed, this counts as organic reach.

Facebook paid reach

To measure the success of your ad campaigns, you’ll have to look at your paid reach. 

When you pay for a sponsored post, the post will appear in the timelines of people who don’t follow you.

Every person who sees your sponsored content is included in paid reach.

Facebook viral reach

You’ve probably noticed that sometimes posts appear in your Facebook timeline from pages that you don’t follow. Above the post, it says that one of your friends liked or commented on it.

When someone sees your content because a friend has engaged with it, that’s known as viral reach.

How is Facebook reach calculated?

Reach is the number of times your post is displayed on a unique screen. You can view this information for your page or any specific post in Facebook Insights, or in your social media analytics tool.

To calculate your average page reach, divide the average number of users reached per post (you can find this number in Facebook Insights) by the number of total page likes. 

Facebook counts reach in daily, weekly, and 28-day intervals and this can sometimes cause some confusion. 

For example, if someone sees your post today, that will count towards your daily reach. If they see the post again tomorrow, it will count again as daily reach. But, because reach only includes unique views, it will only count once in your weekly and 28-day reach.  

Facebook reach vs impressions

Impressions are the total number of times your content displays on a screen. 

If the same person views your content 10 times in one day, that will count as 10 impressions. However, it’ll only count once towards your daily reach.

So if a post shows up in a news feed from the original publisher and appears again when a friend shares it, this will count as two impressions but only one reach.

Facebook reach vs engagement

Engagement is when people interact with your post after they’ve seen it in their news feed. Likes, reactions, comments, and shares are all forms of engagement.

When people engage with your post, it can increase your reach because each interaction provides viral reach, where friends of followers will see your post. 

Plus, Facebook’s algorithm favors engaging content, so it’s likely to boost it in people’s news feeds. 

How to track Facebook reach with an analytics tool

You can monitor your reach in Facebook’s native analytics tool, Facebook Insights.  

But a more effective way to track Facebook reach is with an analytics tool like quintly. You can slice up the data in many different ways, and compile all your findings in an easy-to-use dashboard. Plus, you can compare your Facebook performance to other social media channels, do competitive research, and generate easy-to-share reports.

Let’s have a look at some of the ways to track your Facebook reach with quintly, using the home decor brand North Home as an example.

Reach

The Reach metric shows you the number of unique users who have seen any content from your page over time.

It includes all your organic, viral, and paid reach combined.

For an overview of your daily, weekly, and 28-day reach, you can use the Page Post Reach Table.

Reach by Post Type

It’s useful to see which kinds of content are getting the most reach, as this could help you decide what to create more of.

In this case, albums are the post type with the highest reach, followed by photos. Videos seem to get the lowest reach—this is unusual because people are twice as likely to share video content than any other type of content.

Reach By Demographic

You probably know who your ideal customer is. But do you know whether your content is reaching the right demographic?

In the Reach by Age and Gender table, you can see whether your posts are reaching more men or women. In the above graph, there’s a roughly equal split between males and females in the 18-24 age group.

However, in other age ranges, more male users see North Home’s content than females.

You also need to consider the location of your followers. To find out which country your posts are reaching most people in, you can use the reach by country metric. 

It’s no surprise that British brand North Home’s content is mostly reaching people in the UK.

Organic, Viral, and Paid Reach over Time

To find out whether you’re getting a good ROI on your paid ads, you’ll want to compare your paid reach with your organic and viral reach.

North Home’s organic reach is highest. They haven’t been running any ads, so there’s no paid reach for this time period.

You can display the same data in a different way with Reach Type Distribution, which shows you the results of the previous 28 days.

Why is your Facebook reach so low?

Worried that your Facebook reach is low? Here are some possible reasons why your content isn’t getting as much reach as you’d like.

    • Your content isn’t engaging enough. Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes content that gets more engagement. A lack of interaction signals that your content isn’t interesting enough to display in the news feed.
    • Your audience is small. If you don’t have many followers on your page, your reach will be limited. 
  • You don’t post often enough. Posting regularly is a good way to get more reach. 
  • You post too often. On the other hand, if you bombard your followers with too many posts, people might mute or unfollow your page.
  • You aren’t targeting the right audience. Are you sure that the people you are targeting are likely to be interested in your brand? Make sure your customer persona is accurate.

How to boost your Facebook reach in 3 easy steps

Though it might seem out of your control, there are some things you can do to boost your reach.

1. Get the timing right

If you share content when all your followers are asleep or at work, they’re unlikely to see it. 

Make sure you research the best time to post content. This will depend on which country your followers are in and their typical daily routine. It may require some experimentation to find your optimum time to post.

2. Use different post formats

There are many different types of content that you can create on Facebook—stories, images, videos, and live streams.

Mix it up by creating different types of content and tracking the results to find out what performs best. 

Remember that Facebook’s algorithm is likely to prioritize native content over external links. That means a Facebook video will probably get more reach than a post linking to a video on Youtube.

3. Focus on engagement

We mentioned before how engagement helps increase your reach.

Here are some ways you can encourage engagement on your posts:

  • Ask questions and tell your followers to respond with a comment.
  • Invite your followers to ask you questions.
  • Talk about trending topics.
  • Create a poll and let people vote.
  • Set up a challenge or competition, for example, “Caption this image!”

You can also boost engagement by evoking emotions. People will want to comment on and share content that inspires them, makes them laugh or triggers their curiosity.

 

Track and increase your Facebook reach

Without knowing your Facebook reach, it’s hard to judge whether you’re getting enough engagement and ROI on your organic Facebook content and ads.

The Facebook algorithm is mysterious— no one knows exactly why some posts get more reach than others. But we do know that to reach as many people as possible, you have to post interesting content, in a variety of formats, on a regular basis. Encourage people to interact, make it shareable and post it at the right time for your followers to see it.

With an analytics tool like quintly, you can analyze every detail of your social media campaigns so you’ll learn quickly what gets the best return on investment.

Find out how quintly can help you dive deep into Facebook analytics and measure the impact of your Facebook marketing using rich data insights. 

What Is Facebook Reach and How Is It Calculated in 2023?

Understanding performance should be an integral part of any social media marketing strategy. And what better way to start than by brushing up on key metrics? 

Even though Facebook is the number one social network in terms of global monthly active users, and a key focus of many brands’ digital marketing efforts, some of the platform’s metrics are not exactly straightforward.

How do I calculate monthly reach?
Can I just add daily reach and get a nice sum for a longer period of time?
What’s the difference between average reach and total reach? 

If you’ve ever asked any of these questions, or you generally want to better understand Facebook reach and find out how it’s relevant to your social strategy, keep reading.

In this blog post, we will go over how Facebook defines the metric, how many different types of Facebook reach there are, and what social media marketers should do with all this information – especially now, after the native Facebook Analytics tool is unavailable after June 30, 2021. 1

It’s not that complicated, we promise!

  • What is Facebook reach?
  • What are the different types of Facebook reach?
    • Facebook organic reach
    • Facebook viral reach
    • Facebook paid reach
  • What does all this mean?
    • You cannot sum up Facebook reach
    • Understand Facebook total reach
    • Your number of Facebook fans does not equal your organic reach
  • Facebook reach analytics tool
  • The future of Facebook reach
  • Conclusion

Facebook Reach Analytics

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So, what does reach mean on Facebook?

Let’s start with the very basics: definitions.

According to Facebook, reach is the number of unique users who had any content from your Facebook Page or about your Page enter their screen.

So, in simple terms, it’s the count of Facebook users who came into contact with your brand on Facebook.

The definition alone seems straightforward. What makes matters a bit more complicated, is the fact that reach is calculated in 1-day, 7-day, and 28-day increments. 

For example:

  • If a user sees your content twice in one day and then twice the next day, and you choose to view reach in 1-day increments, the user will be counted once on day 1 and once on day 2;
  • If you choose to view 7-day or 28-day reach, the same user will only be counted once in the 7-day and 28-day periods, respectively, regardless of the number of times they see your type of content.

What does this mean?

The exact same performance in terms of reaching Facebook users can be represented in a few different ways, depending on the timespan you take into account. Keeping this in mind when analyzing your results will help you avoid misunderstandings. 

What are the different types of Facebook reach?

Understanding how Facebook reach is calculated is a good start, but it’s also important to know the differences between the different types of reach:

  • Post reach is the total number of people who saw a particular Facebook post from your Page in their Facebook news feed;
  • Page reach is how many people had any of your content enter their feed.

Both of these types of reach can be further divided into 3 categories:

Facebook organic reach

This is the reach that you get for free thanks to Facebook’s algorithm. It includes your fans seeing your content in their feed when you post it, people seeing your pictures and albums, or users who see mentions of your profile in their feed.  

You can boost your organic reach by finding out when your audience is the most active and working towards increasing your engagement.  

Facebook viral reach

Viral reach consists of the people who saw your content thanks to a third person, as opposed to directly through your Page.

So, for example, if one of your fans shares your post and their Facebook friends see it – they would be counted as viral reach. High viral reach is a sign that your community is highly engaged and willing to act as your ambassadors online.

Facebook paid reach

This category is pretty self-explanatory and consists of all the users who saw your content through Facebook advertising (aka your target audience). 

You can increase your paid reach by optimizing your Facebook campaign settings: experimenting with targetting and bidding, creating new target audiences, and testing multiple creatives.

What does all this mean?

The theory is one thing – the way you apply it to benefit your strategy is another. Here are some key takeaways you should keep top of mind when analyzing your reach on Facebook.

You cannot sum up Facebook reach

Reach is a key metric that is based on the number of unique people exposed to your content.  It only makes sense when viewed in the context of the 1-, 7-, and 28-day timeframes defined by Facebook. 

For example, when analyzing reach in 7-day increments, a user may have seen your content 2 times in one week, and 2 times in the second week. In both cases, they should be counted as 1 user per week. However, you can’t add them up, since the sum will no longer convey unique users for any of the predefined timeframes.

Understand Facebook total reach

Another thing that should be mentioned is total reach. This is not, as some may believe, a sum (again, adding reach is a big no-no) of reach calculated in shorter increments. 

Total reach is another way to call the reach of a Page or an individual piece of content in a certain timeframe that includes the different types of reach: organic, paid, and viral.  

In-depth Facebook Analytics & Reports

Analyze your results. Track your competitors and improve your Facebook marketing. Try NapoleonCat for free:

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Try NapoleonCat free for 14 days. No credit card required.

Your number of Facebook fans does not equal your organic reach

Some social media marketers still believe that organic reach on Facebook is generally equal to the number of fans you have. This is not the case. 

First of all, the Facebook algorithm decides who gets to see your post, and that’s not going to be your entire fan base. The actual reach depends on the type of content you post, the time you post it, and many other factors. 

Second, organic reach isn’t limited to your fans. It also includes events like mention views from users outside of your fanbase.

Facebook reach analytics tool

With NapoleonCat’s Analytics feature, you can analyze your own Facebook Pages, as well as your competitors. You can set a custom time period for your analysis, and you can have your data presented in a daily, weekly, or monthly breakdown.

Reach is one of the main metrics that you can analyze, and it will be broken down into:

Total reach – the number of people who were served any activity from your page including your posts, posts to your page by other people, page like ads, mentions, and check-ins. It’s broken down into nonviral, viral, paid, organic, and total.

Total reach graph in NapoleonCat

Fans daily – the total number of page fans.

Facebook page fans graph – by clicking on the graph, you can see the exact number of fans for a given day.

Fans growth – the net number of page’s new fans.

Facebook Fans growth graph.

Active users – the number of people who reacted, commented, posted on the page, or mentioned it on their own walls. This number includes fans and non-fans.

Active Facebook users graph.

Page fans by country – the number of page fans from the top 10 countries.

Facebook reach – page fans by country. You can also have it presented in a table.

Page fans world map – the map shows all of the world’s countries where your fans come from. If you click on a map, it will show the exact number of fans in a given country.

Facebook Page fans world map.

You can download these sets of data (graphs, tables) in an excel spreadsheet or a .png file. In addition to that, if you’re a fan of convenience, you can generate in-depth Facebook reports in a matter of seconds.

Here’s a video tutorial showing you how to generate a report in NapoleonCat, and what such a report looks like:

In-depth Facebook Analytics & Reports

Analyze your Facebook Page and your competitors, too! Figure out what to post and when. Generate automatic reports within seconds. Try it for free:

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Try NapoleonCat free for 14 days. No credit card required.

Moreover, with NapoleonCat, you can track Facebook reach analytics for any other Facebook Page, e.g., your competitors.

The future of Facebook reach

Since 2014, organic reach2 on Facebook has been steadily declining, mostly due to the platform’s growth and larger amounts of content that suddenly started appearing. 

The ad content space became more and more competitive with time, and Facebook made the practical decision to not show everyone everything there is to show. Instead, users would only see the content that Facebook’s algorithm deemed most relevant to them.

This, of course, meant that audiences of individual Pages and profiles would shrink, and the reach of organic posts would continue to decrease as well.

Even more changes came in 2018, when Facebook decided to overhaul the algorithms3 that dictated what was shown in users’ feeds. In January 2018, Mark Zuckerburg wrote a post4, explaining that the company was shifting its focus towards maintaining connections between people.

Sounds great, right? For business owners trying to get through to new audiences with their marketing, not so much.

One of the things that changed wasn’t reach as such but the way reach was calculated. Up until February 2018, the reach metric took into account how many times your content has been loaded in individual news feeds. As of today, Facebook calculates reach based on how many times a post enters a person’s screen. This is supposed to make the organic reach of Pages more consistent with the way Facebook measures reach for ads.

Wrap up

Facebook reach is a metric often used to assess the performance of businesses on the platform, however, it’s not as straightforward as vanity or post engagement metrics. Understanding reach is a crucial step to fully understanding the effectiveness of your Facebook marketing and refining your strategy. 

We hope our guide helped make things clearer. Take care!

1. Facebook Analytics is Going Away

2. The Decline of Organic Facebook Reach & How to Adjust to the Algorithm

3. Facebook overhauls News Feed in favor of ‘meaningful social interactions’

4. Mark Zuckerberg Facebook Post

Audience reach - what it is, how to calculate and increase it

The reach indicator in advertising is used to evaluate the effectiveness of media and video campaigns, and in SMM - to analyze publications in social networks.

The reach of an advertising campaign allows you to estimate the size of the audience to which ads were shown. It depends primarily on the targeting parameters. In advertising systems, when setting up targeting, you can see the potential coverage - the volume of the target audience. However, the actual reach of a campaign will be affected by bidding and competition. nine0003

For example, using the "Target audience" parameter on VKontakte, even before launching a campaign, you can understand how many people can see ads if you launch targeted advertising for an audience according to selected characteristics.

What is the difference between reach and impressions : impressions can include multiple ad views by the same people, while reach counts the number of unique users who were shown ads.

How to find out the reach of an advertising campaign

You can find out the reach - the absolute number of unique users who saw an ad - in the statistics of advertising accounts.

But if you are interested in the proportion of the audience covered by advertising from the predicted reach, it can be calculated using the formula.

For example, in the campaign settings, a reach of 10,000 people was predicted. And during the campaign, 8,500 people saw the ad at least once. The actual coverage of the campaign is 85%. nine0003

On social media, organic content with high reach has high CTR and engagement. Social network algorithms track users' activity when interacting with content, and how much they are involved - commenting, liking, sharing a post - depends on how actively this content will be shown to other users of the social network.

A post with a high reach on social media that quickly gets a lot of likes and comments will be shown higher in the news feed and will be recommended to other users. nine0003

What is Instagram reach? You can find it in the "Statistics" section in the business profile of the social network.

How Instagram reach is calculated: the system takes into account the number of users who have seen a post, story, the account itself or an advertisement of a business page on a social network. Only the activity of unique visitors is important, so repeated actions of the same person are not included in the statistics. nine0003

What is reach in VKontakte statistics

In VKontakte, in community statistics, you can see three types of reach — audience reach, device reach, and post reach.

How is the audience coverage in VKontakte calculated:

  1. Follower Reach shows how many community members have seen community posts without interacting with ads.

  2. Viral reach - how many people who are not subscribed to the community saw the publication, for example, on the page of another user, community or in the "Recommendations" section. nine0003

  3. Ad Reach shows who saw the post thanks to the ad.

  4. Total Coverage summarizes the data for all previously listed coverages.

In the "Device Coverage" section, you can see which devices users view recordings from. This data can help plan the content and format of your creatives.

Post reach is displayed in page statistics in the Posts section. The data shows how many users and followers of the community have seen the posted post. nine0003

Reach data in personal page statistics is available if the user has 100 or more followers.

What is reach on Facebook

In Facebook, the reach of posts and the number of interactions are shown below each post. Business page owners can find more detailed data in the "Statistics" section. The general statistics page displays two blocks: publication reach and story reach.

You can also go to the "Coverage" section by selecting the appropriate item in the menu on the left. It displays data on organic and paid reach obtained through advertising. nine0003

How to increase audience reach

There are several ways to increase reach in marketing:

  1. Select fewer targeting options in ad campaign settings . The fewer targetings that narrow the audience to which the ad will be shown, the higher the reach - more users will see the ad.

  2. Increase the bid in the advertising campaign .

    3. nine0047

    Conduct sweepstakes and contests on social networks . This will help not only to quickly increase coverage, but also increase brand awareness. You can give subscribers a product for a comment or hold a children's drawing contest and give the winner a handmade toy. Please note: the easier the draw conditions, the more participants and the higher the reach.

  3. Create interesting content in the company's social media community . So you can increase coverage without investing money. Follow trends, test different types of content, and use statistics to analyze which posts are more interesting to users. For example, short videos are now popular: reviews, instructions, scenes from life and entertainment videos. nine0003

how to correctly calculate the engagement rate in social networks

After numerous disputes on the network and due to the lack of a common point of view, we decided to thoroughly analyze the question of how the audience engagement ratio (degree or level) should be calculated, which formula is the most correct and why .

Engagement Rate (ER) - page engagement rate, an indicator showing what percentage of the audience is active in publications. nine0003

Short answer according to generally accepted formulas:
Engagement Rate (ER) = (Sum of all reactions, comments, reposts) / number of subscribers
Average Engagement Rate (ERpost) = (Sum of all reactions, comments, reposts for all posts) / (Number of posts)/(Number of followers)
Daily Engagement Rate (ERday) = (Sum of all reactions, comments, reposts for all posts per day)/(Number of followers)

If you need to understand what is a good Engagement Rate and how effective your page is in this regard, then look at the full versions of our studies in recent years, they calculate the average engagement rate of pages across different social networks (statistics on this indicator in the very last section) : nine0003

Audience activity in 2020

Audience activity in 2019

Next, we will tell you in more detail what the Engagement Rate is, what calculation methods exist, why they are good and what are their disadvantages:

To begin with, let's look at the main definitions that can come in handy and are often confused with Engagement Rate:

Engagement (Engagement) - audience reaction unit: like ["I like"] (like), comment, share [share] (share), sometimes clicks (following the link), reactions for Facebook and dislikes ["dislikes" ] for YouTube or retweets (retweet). nine0003

Engagement Volume - total number of engagements (sum of all engagements).

Love Rate - number of likes in terms of audience size (total number of all likes/number of subscribers*100%).

Talk Rate - number of comments in terms of audience size (total number of all comments/number of subscribers*100%).

When calculating the average publication, the number of entries is added to the denominator:

Reach is the number of people who had at least one contact with the publication (or advertisement).

Views - the number of views of the publication.

Methods for calculating the level of involvement in foreign SMM

There is also no consensus - most often they tend to several basic formulas and definitions:

Engagement rate - a metric that measures the level (degree) of engagement that a certain part of the published content receives from the audience. *- https://trackmaven.com/marketing-dictionary/engagement-rate/

There are three main types of engagement rate: ER in terms of the day (daily engagement rate or ER day), ER in terms of the post (engagement rate or ER post) and ER in terms of coverage (engagement rate by reach or ERR). It is worth noting that foreign services and companies very rarely separate indicators by type: in one context you can call the classic indicator ER post, and in another - ERR, so when working on the Popsters service, we immediately began to separate these metrics so that there was no confusion. nine0003

*-https://www.socialbakers.com/blog/1427-engagement-rate-a-metric-you-can-count-on ,

** - http://simplymeasured.com/blog/facebook-metrics-defined-engagement-rate/

Types and meaning of different engagement indicators ER

Engagement rate by reach or ERR

The basic formula for a single publication is:

The final value will show the % of people who were active on a particular post. nine0003

Average ERR will show the average % of people who show interest in the page's posts among those who saw them.

One of the disadvantages of this indicator is that reach data is available only to page administrators, and it will not be possible to calculate it without being related to the page (with the exception of data from open statistics of some pages on VKontakte).

Another disadvantage is much more serious: reach is a relative measure. The numbers can change under the influence of various factors: the time of day, the viral potential of the post, the weight of the page for users in social networks with an algorithmic feed, and others. nine0003

For most cases, social networks do not separate reach from subscribers and total reach. In this case, a publication with sufficient viral potential (viral post), having gone beyond the community due to shares, and being in the feed of their friends and subscribers, will receive greater coverage and relatively low engagement (relative to the total coverage figure). As a result, the ERR percentage of the publication will fall.

In another situation, especially in social networks with an algorithmic feed, a post may appear in the feed of a very narrow part of the audience (on the example of small pages, this is most noticeable) - only a couple of dozen people who are likely to be active, because. initially interested in the content of this page. Then, with very low coverage, you get a relatively high level of engagement. nine0003

As a result, when comparing the ERR of the viral record and the ERR of the record from the second situation, the engagement rate of the second one will be noticeably higher.

Checking these conclusions is quite simple - you can download the statistics of publications with coverage, calculate ERR and sort by this indicator. As a result of such an operation, objectively popular records will not be in the top.

Conclusions: engagement rate by reach is suitable in a situation where you need to estimate the approximate % of people who are active among those who have viewed a post, but it is absolutely not suitable for comparing the quality of these publications, their popularity and will be biased when comparing different pages and their records. nine0003

Daily engagement rate or

Basic formula for calculating ER day for the selected day or period:

The final value will show, presumably, the % of people who were active per day from the number of subscribers.

"Presumably" because the conditions under which this metric is calculated do not take into account a sufficiently large error - like other ER indicators, each active subscriber could be active several times, only in the case of ERday this error becomes more noticeable, because . the activity of one person on different posts published in the same day will have a stronger effect on the final value. nine0003

Another negative point of this metric is that the frequency of publications is not taken into account: if you want to increase ERday, just publish more posts (as long as the rule is followed: the more posts per day, the greater their total activity).

Conclusions: daily engagement will help you understand the approximate % of activity in relation to the number of subscribers, in other words, the "effective reach" (volume of engagements) of the page, but this indicator can hardly be considered more useful than the net volume of engagements when translated into a % value ( volume engagement). nine0003

Publication engagement (engagement rate or ER post)

The basic formula looks like this:

The total represents the [average] % of people engaged in a particular [or average] post.

Unlike ERR, this indicator is based on the absolute value in the denominator - the number of subscribers, and will not drastically differ from publication to publication. Thanks to this, high-quality and interesting publications will be at the very top when sorting. nine0003

The disadvantage of this indicator is that as the number of subscribers grows, the overall percentage of engagement [relative to the total number of subscribers] falls. This happens for various reasons: over time, interest in the page from the oldest subscribers may fall, they have an increase in the number of other communities in the feed, and because of this, the page entries are less likely to see them, and others. In this regard, it is impossible to compare the ER of pages with radically different audience sizes without adjustment - you need to take into account the average indicators for pages of this size, and then make a comparison. nine0003

*Research - https://www.slideshare.net/KushnirArseniy/popsters-70787649

Conclusions: ER post will help to evaluate how interesting publications are for the audience, compare posts and activity in different communities (with adjustment if the audience size varies greatly).

Other variations of Engagement Rate calculation

In their work, some companies and services use other options for calculating the ER indicator:

nine0002

Engagement rate by views

The calculation is similar to the calculation of ERR, but instead of coverage, the number of views of the record is used:

ER view = (Amount of post engagements)/(Number of views)*100%

Average ER view = (Sum of ER view of all records in the analyzed period)/(Number of records in the analyzed period)

This variation of the indicator has the same disadvantages as ERR, but in addition to them, a new one is added: the views indicator takes into account non-unique views of the audience, i. e. multiple views by each viewer are summed up when the post is reopened, which can cause different post metrics to vary even more than ERR. For these reasons, we would not recommend using ERview in any quality assessment of community content. nine0003

Engagement with multipliers

In this case, a multiplier is added for different indicators of the post: this is justified by the fact that "a repost is a more significant sign than a like" or "account owners often respond to the comments of their subscribers", after which the number of reposts is multiplied by 2 (3, 4 or another figure), and the number of comments by 0.5 (halve).

As you can see, in all previous variations, ER is a % indicator of the size of the audience (or coverage). Thus, we can say:

ER engagement rate is a metric that displays the % of the audience involved in community events.

As a consequence, engagement (engagement rate) with multipliers cannot be called ER, because with multiplication factors not equal to 1, the final figure will not show the % of the engaged audience. It would be possible to call such metrics some kind of “activity index” or “virality index”, depending on the multipliers used, but not the engagement rate. nine0003

Engagement per subscriber

This metric is almost identical to the calculation of the ER post indicator, only the final multiplier is not 100%, but simply 100. As a result, the metric shows not "% of the audience involved in the publication", but "the average number of reactions per 100 subscribers". With the help of this wording, the common minus for % ER indicators is leveled - the possibility of having several reactions from the same subscribers, because. there is no reference to audience size. nine0003

The problem of this option lies in the new wording: the classical interpretation refers to the audience, the volume of which also needs to be taken into account, but this is not the case in the new format, which leads to the erroneous impression that this indicator is an absolute value, and it can be compared between themselves on different pages, regardless of the size of the audience.

Conclusion

So what do the different indicators say and in what way can they be useful? nine0003

ER coverage cannot be considered objective when assessing the quality of publications or comparing different pages with each other, because. is a relative indicator. In our opinion, it is more correct to compare the coverage by itself, or the "reach / number of subscribers" indicator, then you will see the approximate % of the audience that page publications reach.

The ER day indicator is useful for assessing the engaged % of the audience in general, but it is worth remembering the negative aspects of this indicator, and it is definitely not suitable for assessing the quality of content. nine0003

The ER post metric turns out to be the most useful in practice - it will help evaluate and compare the popularity of different publications, compare (with adjustments for different audience sizes) different pages with each other.

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