When it comes to promoting and distributing company content, engagement is a key metric for social media. But how is it measured? And what actions make up an “engagement?”
Well, the answers depend on what social media platform you’re considering because each one measures engagement differently.
Social media engagement rates measure interactions (i.e., likes, comments, shares, retweets, replies) on a social media platform. For example, if your brand generates 500 impressions on a LinkedIn post along with 6 reactions (the sum of interactions, clicks and new followers from the post), you have an engagement rate (sum of reactions divided by the number of impressions) of 1.2% on that post, which would be considered low. A 2% engagement rate is an adequate goal for a LinkedIn post. Twitter has similar engagement rate definitions and a good engagement rate is 1%.
Types of Social Media Engagement Measurement on Twitter and LinkedIn
To better understand how to measure engagement for your brand on Twitter and LinkedIn, let’s break down the different types of social media engagements and their unique value to social media marketers.
Likes
Liking a tweet or LinkedIn post is the easiest way for your audience to engage with social media content. The more likes you get on a company post, the higher the likelihood that others who see the post will interact with it (“look at all these likes! It must be an interesting tweet!”), thus increasing your engagement rates even more. Also, some liked tweets and LinkedIn posts may show up in the feeds of people who don’t follow you, thereby increasing your reach and your opportunities to gain more followers.
LinkedIn Shares and Twitter Retweets
Retweets and LinkedIn shares are even more valuable because they increase your engagement rate and expand your reach to people who don’t follow you. Because the message shows up on the feed via someone that the audience already knows, your company’s message is seen as more credible.
LinkedIn Comments and Twitter Replies
A LinkedIn Comment or Twitter Reply improves engagement rates and reach (comments appear in the feed of the commenter’s network) but also shows a higher level of engagement and the opportunity for your followers to continue the conversation. Of particular importance for your employee advocates, those who comment on LinkedIn posts see the comments from others who engaged in that same post, increasing reach for the commenters.
Follows
Followers that match your buyer personas translate to potential influencers and customers so a new follow generated via a post is a very valuable type of engagement.
Twitter Share or LinkedIn Send
Engagement through direct messaging is an often overlooked part of social media marketing, but it is powerful because it’s a 1-to-1 endorsement of your message, giving you instant credibility.
Mentions
When someone mentions your company with an @ symbol, your reach increases, but your LinkedIn or Twitter engagement rate is not affected. However, it’s important to track mentions closely as a measure of brand sentiment and for customer support issues.
Hashtags
You’re likely very familiar with using hashtags to extend reach. Agorapulse tested the impressions of LinkedIn posts with and without hashtags and found that posts with one hashtag generated a 29.5% increase in impressions.
Use a maximum of five hashtags on LinkedIn and up to two hashtags on Twitter. LinkedIn does not use clicks on a hashtag in a post to calculate engagement, but Twitter does.
Clicks
If you compare the clicks you generate from your social media posts to paid ads, you’re driving an average range of $7 to $11 in value per LinkedIn click. With this in mind, you can track clicks to provide concrete proof of the value of your social media program. To be more precise in your calculations, substitute the average values above with the cost per click associated with your industry.
How to track social media engagement measurement for your brand
For LinkedIn, go to your company page as an administrator of the page and click on the Analytics tab, then select Updates. On the Update Analytics page, select the date range you’d like to review and scroll down. You’ll see a list of all your LinkedIn company posts with related measurements such as the number of impressions, clicks, comments, shares, and follows, as well as the engagement rate.
For Twitter, use https://analytics.twitter.com/ and sign in with your Twitter account. Select the Tweets tab to see impressions, engagement rates and more for each tweet and selected date ranges.
To go beyond basic social media engagement measurement, check out these top social media analytics tools.
Final Thoughts
Now that we’ve explored the different types of engagements on Twitter and LinkedIn and how to measure them, we can think about ways to increase engagement. Please Share has solutions that work with Slack to make it super easy for your employees to engage with your company’s social media content and drive up your engagement rates as well as your reach. The app also has extensive reporting on engagement and other metrics. Check out our new reporting features and our interactive demo to see how it works.