‘Is this good?’ Your definitive guide to Engagement Rates

Posted on July 29, 2020

Wearisma’s new series ‘Is this good? Your definitive guide to…’ will provide you with key metrics to help you understand how to accurately measure the effectiveness of your influencer marketing activities and to check whether, well…if it’s good.

One question we always get asked at Wearisma is ‘what is a good Engagement Rate?’. The answer is always the same – it depends! It depends on your brand’s geography, industry and even, the social media platform. While this may seem daunting, our product team has developed a tool to make your work a whole lot easier. Before we jump in, let’s go back to basics to explain why you need to know about Engagement Rates in the first place. 

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Now more than ever, brands are relying on data to prove the value of their investment. In doing this, it’s important to know that Engagement Rate is king. It is the most popular metric among marketers (90% use it) for determining the ROI of an influencer marketing campaign. 

But what is an Engagement Rate? 

The Engagement Rate shows the level of interaction between social media users and a piece of content. Factors that determine this rate include; the number of likes, shares and comments received from users (all of which differ by platform, geography, industry etc.).

Why is it so important?

Engagement Rates are a crucial metric as they help brands decide which influencers they want to work with. Through looking at their past Engagement Rates you can determine:

• The performance of their previous content.
• The level of interaction they have with their audience.
• How effective they are when producing paid vs. organic content and most importantly,
• If their content will be successful for your brand.

No matter how visually appealing their content may be, if an influencer has little engagement from their followers it’s pretty clear that you won’t have a healthy return on your investment in them. Having a big following is not enough, an influencer must also prove they can produce content their audience enjoys, especially when the content is #sponsored. If the Engagement Rates for their sponsored content is consistent with or higher than their average, chances are, you’re on to a winner. 

Engagement over Reach

It’s typically believed that as an influencer’s following increases, their Engagement Rate decreases but as we’ll explain later, this can depend on a series of factors. It’s key to understand that Engagement Rate trumps reach. Although reach is good for creating brand awareness, engagement will bring people to your business, generating leads and sales.

In some regions, working with influencers with a smaller following, such as micro-influencers is cost-effective. This is because they cost less than those with a higher following, and because of their high engagement it will mean your CPE (cost per engagement) will be lower, so it’s a win-win! 

Wearisma’s new free Engagement Rate Benchmark tool will help you accurately measure the effectiveness of your influencer marketing investment dependant on your country, industry and social media platform preference.

Why Engagement Rates can be a tough metric to figure out

Now we’ve established what an Engagement Rate is and its importance, we’ll discuss why it can be challenging to calculate this important metric on your own.

Manually measuring is very time-consuming

Firstly, working out an Engagement Rate manually can take forever. This is because you have to use a calculation such as this for each post you want to measure. On instagram, it looks something like this:

(((Likes + Comments ) / # Posts ) / Followers ) x 100

So say you want to measure the average Engagement Rate of one influencer, you would have to use the calculation to measure the Engagement Rate on all of their past posts to get an accurate figure. Depending on how many influencers you aim to use in your campaign it may have to be repeated quite a few times. As you can imagine, it’s no fun to do this manually!

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Manually measuring is not always accurate 

In a few cases, Influencers may not have entirely accurate engagement metrics, inflating data such as likes and followers have never been easier. Having accurate data is essential in calculating Engagement Rates, without this you’ll be unable to judge the true effectiveness of your influencer selection. Wearisma’s platform provides accurate engagement data straight from the social media platforms (none of this ‘third party’ business) over an adjustable period of time. This allows you to easily spot suspicious spikes in engagements so you can avoid the pitfall of phoney data.

How can we help? 

Wearisma’s platform has a database of over 300K vetted influencers spanning 47 countries worldwide to help you discover the best influencers for your campaigns and accurately measure their effectiveness.

We provide metrics on every singly influencer, including:

• Total Likes, Comments and Media Value
• Average Engagement per post (organic and paid posts)
• Average Engagement Rate per post (organic and paid posts)
• Average Media Value per post (organic and paid posts)
• Cost Per Engagement (CPE)

These metrics will assist you to outline the value your influencer marketing activities are bringing to your brand, organisation or client. They will also save you time determining if your preferred influencers are the right fit for your campaign. Decisions backed by intelligent insights are the key to campaign success!

You can take a closer look at the finer details by analysing the performance of a singular post. For each individual piece of content we provide:

• Reach
• Engagement Rate
• Media Value

This information is very useful when tracking the performance of your campaigns as you can benchmark the Engagement Rates of your posts against the influencer’s average.

Gauging Audience interest

It is common for an influencer to not fall under just one category, e.g. beauty or fashion. If this is the case they will have an audience with divided interests. Posts related to one topic may perform far better than those related to another. To truly understand if an influencer is right for your campaign you need to identify their performance of each content category.

We can help with this. Our platform provides data on an influencer’s audience engagement by category, compared with their average. This allows you to easily identify an influencer’s best performing content categories, so you can determine if they are the right fit for your campaign.

Measure your campaign’s effectiveness with Wearisma’s new tool!

When looking for influencers and their Engagement Rates it’s important to understand how they can differ and why. Thankfully with Wearisma’s new Engagement Rate Benchmark tool you can benchmark the effectiveness of your recent campaign against factors that matter such as country, content category, platform to name a few. For example, in the UK the average Engagement Rate for beauty content on Instagram is 3.1% while in Italy it’s slightly lower at 2.7%.

Having this insight at your fingertips is a sure-fire way to ramp up your ROI by making sure you’re on the right track. 

Sign up here to get first-hand access to Wearismas new Free Engagement Rate Benchmark tool or contact a member of our team today to find out how our influencer marketing solution can help you improve the ROI for your next campaign. 

Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date with our new series so you can finally get an answer to your question ”is this good..?”