Facebook Engagement Rate Calculator

Last updated January 2023

We have provided a useful Facebook Engagement Rate Calculator below. Use it to work out your Facebook Engagement Rate as well as derive the total reach and engagements you would need to get a specific Facebook Engagement Rate.

Feel free to experiment with different scenarios in order to help you better understand this metric.

Facebook Engagement Rate Formula

The Facebook engagement rate equation is:

Click to enlarge

Facebook Engagement Rate = (Engagements x 100) ÷ Total Reach

On Facebook, any positive interaction with a post or ad counts as an engagement. This includes reactions, shares, comments, and clicks (on links, videos and images).

They don’t include negative interactions such as hiding or reporting posts, or unfollowing pages.

Facebook’s New Engagement Rate

Facebook previously used Engaged Users to measure Engagement Rate. However, since the “New Page Experience” rolled out in 2022, Facebook no longer provides either Engagement Rate or Engaged Users as a metric.

However, we can tell what Facebook now uses as Engagement Rate as Meta says this about Engagement Rate for ads:

The expected engagement rate calculates the likelihood that a person will click, react to, comment on, share or expand an ad.

This description is what Engagements ÷ Total Reach specifically measures. While this description may be written for ads, there is no reason to think that organic posts have a different measure – especially as they no longer provide the Engaged Users metric at all.

Where Do I Get These Numbers?

Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t make it easy for you to find this information. There are no reports which will directly report on Engagement Rate within Facebook, so you will have to calculate it yourself.

We have signposted all the places to get these stats below.

Find the Facebook Engagement Rate for your Page

There is a quick and simple way to find out the engagements and reach from the last 28 days from all your posts. The information on this high-level overview of your account is likely what influencer agencies (or potential clients of influencers) will be interested in.

To find this information you simply need to:

1. Go to your Professional Dashboard:

In the left hand menu on your page in Facebook there is a link called "Professional Dashboard". This is where you can access further post stats.

The Insights button will also take you into your Professional Dashboard

2. Look at the Page Overview box at the top for engagements and reach:

3. Use these numbers in the calculator above or use the formula supplied to work out your engagement rate.

This is only really useful for an overview though. If you are trying to compare or judge posts’ performance or track your performance over time, you will need to look at the reports detailed below.

Find the Facebook Engagement Rate for Individual Posts

You can find the Reach and Engagement for a specific post by clicking on the “See Insights and Ads” link on that post.

This is the quickest way to check on the performance of a single post. This will appear on any post by a page (as opposed to an individual) when you are logged in as that page.

If you click on this mini-report it shows you the number of impressions, engagements, and reach the post had (but not the engagement rate). If you plug the numbers for Engagements and Reach into the above calculator you can work out your engagement rate.

A pop up titled "Post Insights" which shows the Impressions, Reach and Engagements of a post on Facebook.

Use Reach rather than Impressions to calculate Engagement Rate, as that is what Facebook does.

If you click on “Total insights” then you can see a lot more detail on which engagements actually occurred:

Notes:

The stats included on this more detailed page include blocked or hidden users. This is why the detailed numbers don’t quite add up with the headline figures. It is also why the number of comments listed here will not necessarily match the number of comments shown in the stats below the post.
All results which are accessed through a post are from the lifetime of that post. This means they can change over time if people scroll through your profile and look at old posts.

Find the Facebook Engagement Rate for Multiple Posts

There are two ways to see the engagement and reach of your posts.

Quick View

If you just want to look through a list of your posts and compare results quickly then you should:

1. Go to your Professional Dashboard. This can be accessed from your page:

The Insights button will also take you into your Professional Dashboard

2. Once you are in your Professional Dashboard, you should click on the “Posts” button in the left-hand menu.

3. Once you do this you will see your posts with their Post Reach and Engagements shown next to them:

Note: There are two drop-down menus above. These control:

The drop-down that initially says “Last 90 Days” will change the date range of posts shown. This date range won’t affect the stats shown (eg you can’t use it to see stats for the last 7 days for a post from 2 weeks ago). It will only change the selection of posts shown by filtering by the date posted.
The drop-down that initially says “Date” only affects the ordering of results. It can be useful if you want to find your best-performing posts.

While this list is useful for a quick overview, there is no way to export this data into a spreadsheet or to look at performance in specific time frames. To do that, follow the instruction below.

How To Download Your Facebook Post Stats

To download all of your posts’ stats in one spreadsheet you need to:

1. Go into your Meta Business Suite, which can be found in the left-hand menu of your Facebook Page, or Professional Dashboard:

A link to the Meta Business Suite in the left hand menu of a Facebook page

You can also access this by simply going to business.facebook.com

2. Once in your Meta Business Suite, you need to go to the Insights tab on the left-hand menu:

3. Then choose the Content section within the in-page menu:

4. This will present you with a list of all your posts, stories, and ads – and all the metrics for them. You can filter these to just be about posts by using the drop-down menu in the top right-hand corner. However, I would recommend going straight to the Export option as the exported file will only include posts anyway.

When you click Export a pop-up will appear with some options.

5. Choose the date range of the posts you want to look at and ‘Lifetime’ to see how well a set of posts have ever done. Or choose ‘Daily’ for the data view to see how posts have done in a particular period. Then click Generate.

6. Once you do this a new pop-up will appear telling you that your export is being processed. This can be painfully slow, so I suggest you go do something else and leave it running in the background. You can leave the pop-up to finish then press “Download Export” to get the excel spreadsheet.

If you close this box though don’t worry – it doesn’t cancel your report. You can still access this (and the last 30 Days of exports) by clicking the little down arrow next to the “Export Data” button at the top of the page.

When the export is ready there will be a small notification:

The Recent Reports menu in Meta Business Suite where you can find all of your exports from the past 30 days.

You may need to refresh the page for this to update.

7. Once your report finally downloads you can find Engagements in column Y and Reach in column Z of the spreadsheet. The column for Reach is called “People reached”.

Top Tip:

Select Column E and press the “Wrap Text” button to make all the rows the normal height.

8. Use the data from this spreadsheet to work out your Facebook Engagement Rate using the above calculator. Either do it post by post, or sum up the columns and calculate it for the entire date range.

Note: This report does not come with thumbnails of post images, so you may have to match content by date.

Facebook Engagement Rate Definition

Facebook now measures Engagement Rate as the likelihood of someone engaging with content. This is the standard way of measuring engagement rate across social media.

This means that you can compare your Facebook posts engagement rate to your Twitter, TikTok, or LinkedIn (for example) posts engagement rates.

Facebook do this by looking at how much something was engaged with and how many people could have engaged with it – and then working out the average number of engagements per person. This is expressed as a percentage for ease of use.

Engagement Rate is a useful measure of how interesting something is. Social Media is a good channel for building brand value, and so simply getting people to engage with your content has value.

How Does It Work?

Imagine a funny cat video is posted on Facebook and seen by 10,000 people.

20 of those people love the cat video. It never gets old to them, and every single time it comes up in their feed they interact in some way. In total they interact with it 5 times on average each (by reacting, commenting on it, clicking on the link, or sharing it).

The other 9,980 people who see the video do not interact with the funny cat video at all. They might be dog people.

This means the total number of engagements is:

20 people x 5 engagements each = 100 total engagements.

With the Facebook Engagement Rate formula, we are looking for the number of engagements that happened divided by the number of people who saw a piece of content.

This would come out as:

100 engagements divided by 10,000 people reached (multiplied by 100 to make it into a percentage).

This equals a 1% engagement rate. So on average, 1% of people interacted with this content. Or alternately (as people react strangely uniformly to content), you could say that 1% of people are likely to interact with this content in future.

However, in this example only 20 people interacted with the video – they just did so repeatedly. This is only 0.2% of people who saw the funny cat video.

If it were 1% of people who had engaged in this example that would mean 100 people engaged with the video in total.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Engagement Rate

The above example demonstrates what makes engagement rate both a frustrating and useful metric. To get the exact same result, one person could find a post extremely interesting, or lots of people could find a post only very slightly interesting.

Because engagement rate is an average we can’t tell which is happening. However, as either a post having widespread interest or being very deeply interesting is valuable in community building, it is arguably useful to have a metric that covers both.

Engagement rate helps us to see if a page, post, or ad is interesting – not the way in which it is interesting.

If you want to measure how widespread the interest in a post is, look at Share Rate instead (shares ÷ reach). If you really want to know how deep the interest in a post is look at the number (and type) of comments instead.

However, if you want to know if a post is, in some way, hitting the right spot with your audience – use engagement rate.

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