/ text updated in May 2020/ 

Why is it so important to engage in social media?

Social media totally changed the way brands communicate with their customers. Brand monologues turned into a mutual dialogue with customers. Each social media channel has different ways of engaging their audiences, which is one of the core goals of all social media activity. Simply put, engagement shows whether a brand succeeds in getting a reaction from their audience, helping to spread viral content.

Open Forum confirms just how important engagement is. Their data indicates that every user engaged by activities on a Facebook Page enables that Page to reach 30 new potential fans. By building fan engagement, brands will provoke an emotional reaction with the potential to benefit the brand itself. These benefits are plenty, including product promotion and brand recognition.

How do I measure engagement?

Engagement in social media refers to any time a user reacts to content. And there are tons of possibilities when it comes to engaging users, especially between platforms. But there are some unifying activities between them – liking, sharing, and commenting. Keep in mind that what they’re called differs across platforms. Different reactions demand different amounts of effort. The bigger the effort, the more engaging the activity.

However, your indicator of good engagement should not be just a sum of the different activities. That will give you a skewed representation of your level of success. That’s why we created the Interactivity Index for Facebook and the Activity Index for other social media platforms – Twitter, and Instagram. And that’s not all:  if you want to compare two profiles of differing sizes, just look at their Relative Activity Index.

Measure social media engagement with Sotrender!

Like I said above, people are more likely to only ‘like’ posts rather than engage in discussions with the brand or share a brand’s content. This means that each action has a different weight to it, and should be measured accordingly. Here’s what engagement typically looks like on a Facebook post. As you can see, the majority of the activity is taken up by likes, with shares and comments taking up less than 10% of the activity.

So how do we adjust this in Sotrender? In order to accurately summarize all activities that occur on Facebook, we established the following weights for user activities:

• Reaction → 1 (the least amount of effort)
• Comment → 4
• Text only → 8
• Multimedia → 12
• Share → 16 (the most effort as well as more likely to increase your reach)

All of these come together to form what we call the Interactivity Index.

The Relative Activity Index is an indicator that makes it possible to reasonably compare profiles that greatly differ in size. It includes only fan activities and Page size. It is calculated by using this formula:

Relative Interactivity Index = fan InI/fan number*1000

For Twitter, it’s somewhat different, as we add a profile’s own activity into the Activity Index, so the weights look like this:

• Admin’s tweet → 8
• Admin’s retweets and replies → 5
• Retweets → 3
• Likes → 1
• Reply → 4
• Mention → 2

Similarly, Instagram doesn’t allow native reposting, so the Activity Index looks like this:

• Likes → 1
• Comments → 8

The Relative Activity Index is counted the same as with Facebook:

Relative Activity Index =  Activity Index/follower(subscriber) number*1000

Who are engaged users?

The last indicator of engagement is the number of engaged users. On Facebook, they are users who were in any way active on the Page over a given period of time. Be it liking, commenting, sharing a Page’s content, adding a post or piece of media, it’s all counted as activity. For Twitter, engaged users are the ones that mentioned a profile or re-tweeted its tweet. And for Instagram – users who commented on or liked posts.

Knowing all these metrics will help you understand how people engaged in your communication and improve your social media strategy.

Want to learn how many users you’ve managed to engage with your social media strategy? Check out your performance in Sotrender to learn more!