Social Media Engagement Metrics & How To Interpret Them

Engagement metrics on a social media platform can give confusing and misleading signals around performance.

Three fundamentals to understanding Engagement metrics

1. They are not an indication or correlation to ROI or business outcomes. They are only an indicator of the content's ability to be relevant to that specific audience at that specific moment in time. They are instant signals that have no long term impact other than telling you if the content resonates or not.
2. The engagement you receive on a post is not replicable. It is a snapshot of sentiment in time to a very specific audience. If you were to post the same content again to the same audience at the same time, the same result is not guaranteed. Because of this variable, the result of a single campaign or content is an unreliable indicator of performance.
3. Engagement metrics come in many different forms and signal different things. It is a bunk exercise to roll up all these signals into a single 'Engagement' metric. That one metric tells you nothing.

If you are looking to measure Engagement, you need to look at each type of engagement separately:

Likes

Usually mean positive sentiment, but ambiguous as to context of sentiment. Largely unhelpful, except to tell you that your audience is active and generally approve of the content.

Emojis

Better indicator of sentiment, but only a small percentage of members use them. The sample sets are often too small to be reliable.

Comments

Aim for these if you're goal is community engagement or 'thought leadership'. You want to spark (and lead) conversations. Thought leaders are generally THE destination of conversation. Comments can also assist in sentiment analysis, but again, only as a snapshot in time.

Shares

Essential distribution objective for an organic strategy as it is the only way to guarantee user-generated reach (without algorithm support). If you want your content to be seen by as many people as possible, aim to have your audience perform this engagement action.

View/Impression

A lot of engagement is 'passive' engagement. Just because the audience didn't engage, doesn't mean the content wasn't seen or valuable to them. It's still important, especially is you are chasing goals around reach and awareness.

Video View Completes

A timed metric. IMO, largely useless and easily gamed. The shorter the video, the great percentage of view completes. Tells you nothing about the value or sentiment of the content on the audience.

Click

Focus on this if your engagement intention is to drive people to a new destination. A click on a social platform becomes 'traffic' on an analytics platform. It is not a guarantee of any action post-click. The role of a social click is to transport the member to the destination. What that member does once on that landing page, whether its convert or bounce, is more dependent on the quality of UX of that page and the member's intent, than where they came from.

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Hidden value behind engagement metrics

If engagement metrics are snapshots of how a content is performing and resonating at a specific point in time with a specific audience, its numbers can help us troubleshoot any performance problems in the campaign.

Leverage engagement metrics as signals informing you how to optimise your current content and future campaigns.