Engagement Rate: The only Stat that Matters
There is exactly one metric that truly matters when it comes to social media marketing. Contrary to popular belief, you really shouldn’t judge your online success by any of the vanity metrics that social platforms and digital marketers have invented to sell you things. You should judge your online success by one thing and one thing only, your engagement rate.
What’s an engagement rate?
To put it simply, your engagement rate is the average percentage of your audience who interact with your content, beyond just viewing it. So how do you find your engagement rate? Well, to answer that question, I’m going to define some other terms first.
Impressions: This is a fancy word for “views.” It’s a measure of how many times your content was seen. Important to note, impressions do not measure how many unique people have seen your content. If I scroll past your Instagram post 5 times, congratulations, you’ve recorded 5 impressions.
Engagement: Anytime a viewer takes an action with your content, that is a point of engagement. Engagement can include but is not limited to liking, commenting, saving and sharing your content. Simply viewing content is not engagement.
Ok, you’ve learned the two important definitions. From here, determining your “engagement rate” is pretty simple. All you need to do is divide your total number of “engagements” on a post by the total number of “impressions” on that post. Voila! You have determined the engagement rate of that post.
Now you can repeat that process for any window of time or grouping of posts. Once you have calculated the total impressions and total number of engagements for your selected window, divide engagements by impressions and you’ve found the engagement rate for that window.
Here’s an example
I’m going to use my TikTok in this example because it displays metrics in a relatively clean way. You can see from the screenshot below that my top 6 videos have a total view count of 7,654. Remember that “impressions” is a fancy word for “views.” I am not concerned with the retention rate or the quality of any of these views, simply that the content has been “seen.”
Now that I have the total number of impressions for these 6 videos, it’s time to find the total number of engagements. I’m not going to include all 6 screenshots below, but I have included one.
I have circled the engagement numbers for this post in red. On desktop, TikTok doesn’t display the number of shares that a video receives, but those numbers are small enough that I’m not going to include them in this exercise today. Anyway, you can see in the screenshot that this video earned 99 instances of engagement. Adding in the instances of engagement across the other 5 videos landed me with a total of 487
From here, I’ll divide my 487 engagements by my 7,654 impressions to determine my engagement rate is .063 for these 6 videos. Now, most human beings are more comfortable with percent values than decimal values, so I’ll multiply that .063 by 100 and affirm that my engagement rate for these 6 videos is 6.3%.
What is a “Good” engagement rate?
Let me site this article from Hootsuite, this blog I wrote a long time ago, and the eBook that blog became: THE AVERAGE ENGAGEMENT RATE ACROSS THE INTERNET IS 1%-3.5%
Yes, you read that correctly. Across the entire internet, the average engagement rate is 1%-3.5%. So, you tell me, is 6.3% good?
The reason I shout this so passionately into the void goes back to another blog I wrote recently about social inflation. In 2025, we live in a digital reality that is rampant with inflation. You can buy followers, clicks, comments, views, truly anything you want, but none of that means shit. Every client I’ve ever had wants the same thing from their social following: conversions. But how can you tell if your audience is resonating with your content in a way that leads them to buy? You just read a newsletter about it. Pull out your calculator and get to work.
If you enjoyed this blog, consider subscribing to my newsletter! One email a week and no spam, I promise. It will keep you updated on when I write more things like this and all of the other content I produce. Subscribe for FREE. 