Social media is essential to business in the 21st century. It’s changed how businesses interact with their customers, it’s changed how consumers discover new products and services, and it’s changed how businesses and organisations strategise their marketing. Most significantly, however, it’s changed how and where businesses advertise their products, favouring the places where they know consumers spend their time – social media, messengers, and apps – and targeting potential customers through paid digital adverts.

There is still something to be said for print advertising and it certainly has its place, especially in niche magazines such as Pro Mobile and, thinking of your customers, inside the brochures and other marketing materials that couples may pick up at wedding fairs. But there’s something extra that digital advertising gives us that traditional ads can’t – data. Using tools like Facebook Insights and Google Analytics, we can learn how many people are seeing our social media posts, how they’re interacting with them, and what they do when they click through to our website. That’s an incredibly powerful thing to be able to do. But it doesn’t just apply to paid social media advertising; we can get these stats and data for our organic social media posts too.

Why is it important to measure social media performance?

Now, analysing your social media data might not be your top business priority. Yes, it’s incredibly important for your social media channel to look good (Robin Kershaw’s DFC accounts are a shining example) and it’s vital to ensure that there’s some consistency and structure to what you do. But it’s all for nothing if you aren’t measuring how well your social media posts are performing. Analysing the performance of your posts allows you to make improvements and convert more potential clients into customers.

Some of you may have already delved into the realm of social media analytics. If so, you will have probably come across measures such as these:
• Reach - how many people have seen your post
• Impressions - how many times your post has been seen
• Interactions / Engagements - how many people have acted on your post (liked, commented, shared, followed a link etc.)

The mistake most people make when analysing their social media data is using Reach as their only measure of success. They say, “Oh, great, my post about choosing the right song for your first dance reached 5,000 people!” That’s by no means a bad thing, but what you then need to ask is: “Of those 5,000 people, how many of them engaged with my post?” After all, your messages are of no use if they're falling on deaf ears. You won't generate leads if nobody cares about what you have to say. That’s why ‘engagement’ is such an important thing to measure and why calculating it properly can lead to really positive changes to the way you use social media to market your business.

In my current job (for a public sector organisation) we've been doing lots of work on analysing how engaged our social followers are, looking at clicks, likes, shares, comments and any other interactions they may have with our posts. Ultimately, this analysis tells us which style of content is working and which isn’t, allowing us to adjust our social media output so that it contains more of the former.

Calculating the engagement rate of your social media followers

Focussing primarily on Facebook, I'd like to share some of my findings with you so that you can replicate this method to analyse the engagement of your own social media following.

Note: this will only work on Facebook business pages, not personal profiles.

I've broken our method down into five steps:
1) gather your data
2) analyse your data
3) evaluate your findings
4) implement changes based on your findings
5) repeat

1) Gathering your data

Unfortunately you cannot simply export the engagement rate data for your Facebook posts. You can view the information in the Insights tab of your page, but I’m yet to find a way to easily export that list (other than copying and pasting, which is a hassle). The best way to calculate Facebook post engagement is the following:

Start with this:
- Go to the Insights section of your Facebook page (under the ‘More’ dropdown at the top)
- Ensure the Overview tab on the left is selected
- Click Export Data in the top right corner
- Select the Post Data option
- Select your date range: if your Facebook page has been running for a while you may want to set this to three months and repeat this process in three months' time so you can make a quarterly comparison
- Export the data (as an Excel spreadsheet by default)


You should then:
- Open the spreadsheet (don't be alarmed, Facebook gives you a lot of information)
- Delete or hide any columns that aren't relevant to your analysis (I recommend keeping: date posted, post content, post type, total reach, total impressions)
- Add a new column with the header 'Interactions'
- Save your spreadsheet for later

Now:
- Return to the Insights section of your Facebook page
- Select the Posts tab (a list of all your posts and their key metrics will be displayed)
- Make sure the drop down menu in the top right corner is set to show Post Clicks / Reactions, Comments & Shares
- Scroll through the posts for your date range, noting the total engagements for each (Post Clicks + Reactions, Comments & Shares) in the ‘Interactions’ column on your new spreadsheet

Note: This data for post clicks, reactions, comments and shares is probably buried deep in the spreadsheet you downloaded earlier (Facebook doesn’t make it easy to figure out). But, as you are probably not working with a large quantity of posts, I would strongly recommend using the above method to take the figures provided in the Insights area on Facebook.


2) Analysing your data

Next you need to calculate the engagement rate of your posts. Rather than relying on the engagement rate provided by Facebook (which, in my experience, is inaccurate), I recommend doing this manually using the formula:

(Total Interactions ÷ Total Reach) x 100

Using a calculator, carry out the calculations for each row of your spreadsheet and add the results to a new column titled ‘Post Engagement’. If you are familiar with Excel, you may want to run this as a formula:

- Select the first cell in your ‘Post Engagement’ column and type: ‘=SUM(’
- Select the first cell in your ‘Interactions’ column - this will be added to the formula
- Type ‘/’ on your keyboard
- Select the first cell in your ‘Reach’ column – this will also be added to the formula
- Type: ‘)*100’

The first cell in your ‘Post Engagement’ column should now show the results of the calculation: =SUM(X / Y)*100 [where X is the ‘Post Engagement’ cell and Y is the ‘Interactions’ cell’]. This figure is your engagement rate for that post.

TIP: Rather than calculate this for each individual post, you can 'duplicate' the formula by calculating the first cell and then dragging the first cell from its bottom right corner until the formula is applied to all the cells in your column.

The engagement rate for all your posts should now be showing.

Now, calculate the average percentage:
- Select the blank cell at the bottom of your ‘Post Engagement’ column and, in the Excel toolbar, select 'Average' from the drop-down menu
- Select all of the cells in your ‘Post Engagement’ column (except the column header)

The average of all those cells will now appear in the cell at the very bottom of that column. This will be your overall average engagement rate for those posts.


3) Evaluate your findings

So, you’ve calculated your average engagement rate. But what does it mean? And what does ‘good’ look like?

Well, you could start by comparing this new average engagement rate to any old figures you have. Or, run these calculations on your last three months and again on the three months before that. Has your average engagement gone up or down? Are people more or less engaged with your posts?

In terms of what constitutes ‘good’, that really depends on your business aims and targets. If you averaged 1% engagement last month but this month you get 1.5%, then that’s an improvement. But over a longer period, you might wish to increase engagement by, say, 3% overall. In which case, if you calculate your figures 12 months on and you’re still at 1.5%, then you may need to make some changes. For Facebook, an engagement rate of 1-2% is considered healthy.