- How does Facebook calculate engagement rate?
I published a video recently
showing you how you could find
your engagement rate on Facebook,
two ways you could find your engagement rate on Facebook.
And one of those was really simple,
it was in Facebook Page Insights.
But then I got a question.
Do you know the actual formula that Facebook uses
to work out the engagement rate?
The engagement/total reach doesn't equal the engagement rate
that Facebook comes up with.
That should be easy to work out, right?
Because we know engagement rate
is the number of engagements divided by the reach,
multiplied by 100,
and all of those statistics are easy to find
in Facebook Page Insights.
So I went and had a look.
On this post Facebook tells us the engagements
are 19 plus two, which equals 21.
I divided that by the reach.
(upbeat music)
It's 375.
And I multiplied it by a hundred,
which comes out at 5.6%.
Which I rounded down to 6%, what does Facebook say?
4%, what?
Are you sure you calculated that, right?
Good.
So I tried it again, but this time with a video post,
and the engagements on this video post
according to Facebook were 67 plus 42, which equals 109.
Let's divide that by the reach of 1,400,
multiply it by 100, 8%.
What does Facebook say?
4%.
Wait, what is going on?
Then it occurred to me.
The same person could be leaving multiple comments
on a post.
They could be reacting to the post.
They could be sharing the post.
So Facebook could be using unique engaged people
rather than the number of engagements.
How do we find out?
We can download some data.
So click on the overview tab, click on export data,
select post data and download.
This is gonna give you a really ugly Excel spreadsheet.
And there is a tonne of data there.
So how are we going to use it to find out
how Facebook calculates engagement rate?
Well, the thing is in this spreadsheet
it shows you the exact number
of engaged Facebook users on each individual post.
So we'll be able to find out,
is that the metric that Facebook are using
to calculate engagement rate?
Let's go find it.
Here's that post that we were looking at,
and I'm going to highlight it so it's easier to see
the numbers that we need.
Firstly, let's get the reach from column I, 373.
That matches what Facebook Page Insights say.
Then scroll all the way over to column O,
and this is giving us the unique users for that post,
which is 15.
Now if you remember our initial calculation was 21.
Time to plug those statistics into the formula.
15 divided by 373, multiplied by a hundred gives us 4%.
4%? (upbeat music)
Yes, that is exactly what Facebook said it was.
Just to be sure let's try it with that video post as well.
I'm gonna highlight it again
just so it's easy to follow the line.
And we can see that reach is exactly 1,400,
unique engaged users is 61,
61 divided by 1,400, multiplied by a hundred is 4%,
which is exactly what Facebook said.
What does this mean?
Well, firstly, it means that Facebook
doesn't take into account video views
when it's calculating the engagement rate.
And I guess that makes sense really
because if you want to see how video posts perform
against other posts, including video views
which skew that data.
And I'd actually argue
that this way of calculating engagement rate
with unique engaged users is probably the best
and most accurate way to do it.
But here's the thing, engagement rate is important
however you calculate it,
as long as you're calculating it consistently.
So if you rely on those statistics in Facebook Page Insights
that's how you should calculate your engagement rate.
Don't use another statistic.
After all that investigation and the maths
it actually looks like the best way
to measure your engagement rate on Facebook
is just to use that little dropdown menu
in Facebook Page Insights.
But you know what, wouldn't you like to know more
about the videos that you post on Facebook?
How many people are watching them?
How long are people watching them for?
Is it even worthwhile you uploading your videos to Facebook?
That's what we're gonna cover in the next video.
So don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you then.