TikTok Engagement Rate Calculator

TikTok doesn’t provide an official Engagement Rate. If you have a business account you can look up your engagements, followers and video views – but not your engagement rate.

However, it can still be useful to work out your engagement rate for yourself. If you are running social media profiles across multiple networks you might want to see which one people are responding to the most. Or else you might want to compare one TikTok account to another – perhaps to see whether you want to hire them as an influencer, or maybe just for your own gratification.

Whatever your reason, you can use our TikTok Engagement Rate calculator to work out either of the two most commonly used versions of Engagement Rate. Each method has its own benefits, so decide what you need to know your Engagement Rate for, then gather those stats.

 

 
 
  • If you are comparing engagement across platforms, then use the standard engagement rate.
  • If you want to see how you square up to other TikTok accounts, use the Follower Engagement Rate (as that’s what influencer agencies use).
Feel free to experiment with different scenarios in order to help you better understand this metric.
 
TikTok Engagement Rate Formulas
The TikTok Engagement Rate equations are:
 
An image showing two TikTok Engagement Rate Equations. As there is no official engagement rate used by TikTok, two options are given: a) engagements as a percentage of video views and b) engagements as a percentage of followers.Click to enlarge
Standard Engagement Rate = Engagements ÷ Video Views
 Follower Engagement Rate = Engagements ÷ Followers
 
Where Do I Get These Numbers?
Anyone can find any of these numbers for any account. If you go to someone’s profile you can see how many followers they have and how many video views each video has. Click on any video and you can see likes and comments, and you can see shares for a video from the main feed.
This is all a bit inconvenient though, so if you want the easy-to-find set of stats (just for your own account), you’ll have to upgrade to a business account. It’s free to do, and once you have you’ll have access to Creator Tools, which includes an Analytics section.
Once in the Analytics section, you can find all of your engagements, video views and followers in one place. There are also a whole host of other stats and charts, and you can look at specific date ranges too.
 
Alternate Calculations
Some agencies have tried to combine both types of engagement to cover all their bases. They use the equation:
 
Engagement Rate = (Likes ÷ Followers) ÷ Videos
 
I can understand the logic here to an extent – it’s a way to show what the engagement rate might be for any given video. But it doesn’t actually make sense. Let me explain with some examples of profile types:
 
An table showing why this is a bad engagement rate calculation
 
While these numbers are only examples, they demonstrate why this equation doesn’t work.
TikTok is great for giving everyone an even footing – a small account can go viral just as easily as a big one. That makes followers count more or less just a way of measuring brand value.
So what this equation tells you is that having more followers is a bad thing. Also posting more videos is a bad thing.
Or to put it another way – an account that rarely posts and no one likes but which has one great video is apparently doing much better than one with a lot of followers, likes, and videos.
 
Top Tip
Because you can’t see shares when you look at a specific video, many influencer agencies ignore them when calculating Engagement Rate (and instead include Likes and Comments only). This isn’t really a problem as shares are the least common of the three engagements so should hardly affect your engagement rate.
It is a shame though as shares are possibly the most valuable form of engagement. I suspect TikTok will add them to the individual video pages soon enough.
 
What is the average TikTok Engagement Rate?
As always, the best benchmark is your own past performance. However, if you are looking to compare yourself to something, here are some averages:
  • Standard Engagement Rate: According to a study by Statista in 2020, TikTok posts had an average engagement rate of 17.5%.
  • Follower Engagement Rate: According to Adage, TikTok influencers had an average engagement rate of 11.83%. However, estimates for this measure vary wildly with some saying between 3-9% and some saying 17-23% (depending on the number of followers an account has).
 
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