ER, ERR, and Other Formulas

Engagement Rate (ER) is the percentage of an account's active audience. Activity refers to various user reactions to posts. For instance, in Instagram*, this includes likes, comments, saves, or video views. In VKontakte, it also considers reposts and polls voices. Let's break down the formula for the engagement rate and what is considered a normal Engagement Rate on Instagram* and other social networks.
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Traditionally, the ER formula is consistent and is calculated on a single post or on all posts over a period. First, you need to calculate the average number of reactions per post — for this, take all the posts over a period (for example, a week) and sum up all the reactions. Divide the total amount by the number of posts in that period. Then, divide the resulting value by the number of followers in the account and multiply by 100. This will give you the engagement rate in social networks.

Each social network has a different set of reactions, for example, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki also take into account reposts and votes in polls.

For Telegram Reactions are these kinds of emojis under a post:

In the ER formula for Telegram, Comments, and Reposts are also included.

For the Freelancer tariff Reposts are not considered for Instagram

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In LiveDune, you can customize engagement metrics (available on the "Business" and "Agency" tariffs):
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1. You can set parameters for calculating engagement for the entire account in the settings.
The arithmetic mean is when reactions from each post are taken and summed up. Then the calculation is done according to the standard formula.
Weighted average is when the already calculated ER of each post is summed up and divided by the number of posts.
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2. Also, on the ER graphs, you can separately view the organic ER of the account or with advertising, if the advertising account is already connected to LiveDune. If not, connect it on the Advertising tab (only for Instagram*). After that, you can enable/disable the dollar sign in the account header to see organic data or with promotion.

The answer to this question is displayed on the account page in the ER widget — it has a small line showing whether the specified ER is higher or lower than accounts in the same weight category (by the number of followers). This way, you can determine the standard Engagement Rate for your account. We conducted a small engagement study on a sample of 500K Instagram* accounts to understand how this metric changes depending on the number of followers.

If you need to know ERday, add up the ER of all posts published on the desired day. For example, if there were 3 posts in one day with ERs of 1.2%, 2%, and 1.6%, the ERday would be 4.8%.

In the times of algorithmic feeds, ER has become not the most objective measure of engagement, as it is calculated from the total number of followers. But not all followers are active (for instance, commercial accounts), and some simply do not see your posts in their feed. Hence, calculating engagement considering such followers is not objective since they didn't even see your post.

It is more accurate to assess engagement level by the Engagement Rate Reach metric, abbreviated as ERR. The ERR formula is almost identical to ER, but it is calculated from the average reach of posts rather than followers.

In most cases, ERR will be higher than ER, as reach is always less than the number of followers. However, if you promote posts with internal social network advertising, ERR will likely be lower than ER due to the larger display of the post to other users of the social network who are not your followers.

This formula is used to calculate engagement in social networks only for VKontakte and YouTube (though it is available for other social networks, such as Instagram, in the Summary and Engagement tabs). In VK and YT, the number of post views is available to all users, not just the account owner, so it is convenient to use ERV for comparison. The obtained value will be very close to Engagement Rate Reach but slightly less because one user can see the same post several times, each of these views being considered in the formula.

Reach Rate (only for your own accounts, except YouTube) shows the ratio of the average reach of posts to followers over a chosen period. This metric helps to understand the portion of Instagram users you managed to reach.

​Views Rate (for other VKontakte and YouTube accounts, as well as for your own YouTube accounts) shows the ratio of the average number of views of posts to followers over the selected period. This metric is calculated in the Posts tab for each post separately.

Besides calculating ER for posts and for the entire period, our service calculates ER every day and keeps it for further display as a graph.

The data on this graph is collected only after adding the account to the Dashboard and with an active tariff plan (If the connection to the account is interrupted or the paid access ends, the data will not be collected). For some accounts, data may be available for past periods, as they were on monitoring by someone else.
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ERR dynamics (green line) are available only for your own accounts. For other accounts, you will only see ER (blue line).

The data on this graph is calculated daily at midnight Moscow time, based on the last 20 posts. The graph calculation is done without considering ads, promoted posts, and based on the median. The median means 50% of accounts have an ER less than this number, and 50% have more. Each point on the graph represents a day. The graph calculates 2 metrics:
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​Engagement Rate (ER) blue line - the ratio of the average number of all interactions on posts to the number of followers.
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​Engagement Reach Rate (ERR) green line - is almost identical to ER but calculated from the average reach of posts rather than followers.

If you have any questions, write to us in the site chat (Help button in the upper right corner), in the Telegram chat-bot https://t.me/ld_support_bot or by email [email protected]