Engagement rate
Engagement rate is the proportion of people who interacted with a post out of everyone who saw it, calculated by dividing total interactions such as likes, comments, shares and saves by views or reach, and expressed as a percentage.
Engagement rate exists because raw interaction counts are meaningless without knowing the reach behind them. Two hundred likes on a clip seen by a thousand people is remarkable. The same two hundred on a clip seen by half a million is a warning sign.
How it is calculated
Divide total interactions by reach and multiply by a hundred. The complication is that nobody agrees on which denominator to use. Views, reach, impressions and follower count all get used, and they produce very different numbers for the same post, so a figure quoted without its basis is not comparable to anything.
- →By views — the fairest basis for short-form clips, and the one used here.
- →By reach — similar, but excludes repeat views.
- →By followers — inflates the figures for small accounts and deflates them for large ones.
- →By impressions — the most conservative, since it counts every appearance.
What counts as good
On short-form video, engagement by views of two to four per cent is normal, five per cent and above is strong, and under one per cent suggests the clip reached people who were not interested. Saves and shares carry more weight than likes, because they represent a deliberate act rather than a reflex.
Why campaigns watch it
Engagement rate is one of the more reliable tells for manufactured views. Purchased traffic rarely comes with proportionate engagement, so a clip reporting large view counts and almost no interaction is the classic signature. That is why verification looks at the ratio rather than at either number alone.
See which clips earn real engagement, not just views.
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