Two ways to measure engagement
By followers is the version you can calculate for any public account, including a competitor’s or an influencer’s: add up the likes, comments, shares and saves on a set of posts, divide by the number of posts, and divide that by the follower count. 1,000 interactions across 5 posts is 200 per post; on 10,000 followers that is a 2% engagement rate.
By reach divides interactions by the number of people who actually saw the posts, which only the account owner can see in their analytics. It is the fairer measure of how good the content is, because most followers never see a given post — if those 5 posts reached 40,000 people in total, the rate by reach is 2.5%.
Getting a number you can compare
- Use the same set of interaction types every time. Some tools count saves and shares, some don’t.
- Average over at least 10 recent posts so one viral post doesn’t skew it.
- Don’t mix formats and networks: Reels, carousels and LinkedIn text posts behave differently.
- Engagement rates often fall as follower counts grow, so compare accounts of a similar size.
If you are paying for reach rather than earning it, the CPM calculator turns ad spend and impressions into cost per click and per conversion.