Views, views, views. It’s all about the views, right?
Whilst the reach of a piece of content is a useful indicator to have in any TikTok marketing campaign, it’s only part of the puzzle. And, when selecting creators to work with, views and follower counts aren’t enough to decide whether they’re right for your brand.
Clearly, high views but low engagement wouldn’t add a lot of value to your brand if your goal was to create a meaningful connection with your target audience. You need to assess how relevant and engaged their audience is, before collaborating with any influencers on your next campaign.
Let’s see how engagement rates work, and what tools you can use to track this on TikTok and other social media platforms.
Why engagement matters
The For You Page helps users discover a wide range of content based on their individuals interests and preferences. On the other hand, it amplifies the content of creators and brands, by connecting them with viewers who are most likely to love and engage with their videos.
Every post gets a chance to land on the For You Page; so any video could get a ton of views. Yet if viewers don’t find find it interesting or entertaining enough, the post won’t get many likes, comments, or shares. As a brand, there’s little point in spending your marketing budget in creators and content that don’t resonate with the audience.
So, to understand the engagement rate of creators or specific posts, try these methods.
TikTok engagement rate calculator
The engagement rate (ER) of a TikTok creator can be based on 2 different factors: views and following.
Views
This method uses the sum of likes, comments and shares, divided by the number of views.
Following
The other method divides the sum of interactions by the user’s follower count.
Here at TIKTAL, we go by what TikTok uses, which is the first method – dividing the sum of interactions by the number views. To learn more about what an average TikTok engagement rate is, depending on the follower size of an influencer, check out the table by Eazy Viral below.
| Follower Size | Average Engagement Rate |
| 5,000 – 20,000 followers | ~18.4% |
| 20,000 – 100,000 followers | ~15.6% |
| 100,000 – 500,000 followers | ~17.9% |
| 500,000 – 1,000,000 followers | ~22.8% |
| 1,000,000 – 5,000,000 followers | ~20.6% |
| 5,000,000+ followers | ~21.7% |
Working out engagement rates is obviously time-consuming, especially if your brand is planning a large influencer marketing campaign with multiple creators involved.
How can you make this process efficient and scalable? Simple. You can use any influencer marketing tool, such as HypeAuditor – a reliable multi-source audience data and analytics platform that enables agencies and brands to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns.
Just enter any creator’s username, and you’ll receive an engagement score based on a number of factors (including follower count, average number of likes, and total videos) taken from the past 30 posts of the creator. It looks like this:
You can start to use this nifty engagement rate calculator by heading to the HypeAuditor Reports Hub page, and:
- Click on your chosen social media platform from the top menu, such as TikTok.
- Click “Try now” and create an account to test out the features, which include Account Quality Scores, Followers Growth Tracking, Video Performance, Audience Engagement and Activity, and more.
- On the engagement rate calculator, type in any influencer’s username.
- Once you have clicked the “Check” button, a new page opens up showing different data points about the influencer’s engagement rates. Job done!
FREE TikTok engagement rate calculators
Get started today, and take advantage of these top 3 TIKTAL picks for engagement rate calculators that your brand can use on your next influencer marketing campaign.
GRIN
GRIN calculates TikTok engagement rates by taking the number of post engagements (likes, shares, and comments) and dividing that number by the influencer’s follower count. It can also work out Instagram and YouTube engagement rates.
PHLANX
PHLANX offers a free 1-month trial. Not only does it provide TikTok engagement rates, but also influencer audits for different social channels including TikTok.
inBeat
inBeat uses a similar method as HypeAuditor, with an average of the creator’s likes and comments over their last 30 posts. Since engagement rates can vary from post to post, using the average across a month is a good way to get a more realistic picture.
Now that we’ve covered TikTok, let’s briefly go over engagement rates on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Clubhouse.
Engagement rate calculator for other social media channels
Now more than ever, Instagram’s algorithm is hard to win over. The platform is much more mature than TikTok, and more saturated with content. Achieving an average engagement rate of 1% to 4% requires significant effort. As an influencer on Instagram, you have to thoroughly study your account insights to know which posts have worked well, what time-slots you should be posting in, etc.
As a brand, you can calculate any Instagram influencer’s engagement rate by gathering stats from their last 10 posts. Then, use this formula to to work it out:
(((Likes + Comments + Saves) / Posts) / Followers) * 100
Since you can’t gain access to the number of saves for any profile, you might want to use HypeAuditor again, and check the influencer’s audience quality score for a quick assessment.
YouTube
Calculating YouTube’s engagement rate is somewhat similar to TikTok—it can be done in 2 ways: based on views or subscribers.
Views
This method sums up interactions on a video, divides it by total video views, then multiplies by 100. Like so:
((Likes + Dislikes + Comments) / Subscribers) * 100
To get the average engagement rate, the formula would be:
ER / Total posts
Subscribers
Another method, according Socialbakers, is to sum up all the likes, dislikes, and comments that a channel has per video and divide this figure by the total number of subscribers.
((Likes + Dislikes + Comments) / Subscribers) * 100
Again, using these manual formulas is rather laborious. Instead, you can rely on HypeAuditor to assess the quality and authenticity of any YouTube creator.
An excellent engagement rate for Twitter would be anything above 1%. This rate is relatively low compared to all other social media platforms; this is because Twitter has a much higher frequency of posting versus TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. Your branded content will be competing with a much larger pool for retweets, replies, clicks, follows, likes, etc.
Check out this free Twitter engagement rate calculator to work it out.
LinkedIn isn’t just a site for job posts and company communications. It could actually be the most effective platform for your brand to gain organic reach without paid ads.
According to Content Cal, good engagement rates for LinkedIn range from 2 to 6% – which indicates that engaging users on LinkedIn can be much easier than on other networks. Quality, data-backed content that adds value and uses a mixture of icons, images and videos tend to do well here.
Try out this free LinkedIn engagement rate calculator.
Snapchat
There’s no existing tool to calculate engagement rates on Snapchat (yet). However, as a brand, Snapchat is a useful tool that provides a detailed insights tab on each piece of content.
The Insights tab on Snapchat includes several key metrics such as stories’ total views, view time, reach, and even audience demographics (gender and age). You can also see the “fall-off” rate of your stories.
Clubhouse
As with Snapchat, there’s no specific tool that automatically works out engagement rates on Clubhouse.
You could get a sense of this by somehow tracking how long listeners stay in the rooms your brand organizes and moderates. Although the platform has had its up and downs, with a decrease in interest post pandemic, it’s been used by well-known personalities such as Oprah, Serena Williams, Snoop Dogg and even Elon Musk.
With its exclusive nature (access via invite only) and long-form interest-based discussions, Clubhouse is well worth experimenting with as a brand.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are various tools and methods to understand engagement rates on TikTok and across social media platforms.
Sounds overwhelming, right? If you’re working on a large-scale campaign with several TikTok creators, you probably don’t want to spend hours and hours figuring out the engagement rate of each creator, and track every single piece of content they put out for your brand.
So why not let us at TIKTAL take care of the full campaign process for you? It’s what we do (and we’re pretty good at it)! Get in touch today, we’d love to help.