Why Socialbakers’ Engagement Rate is not a solid metric

Fri, 27 Dec 2013 12:57:49 +0000

We have seen it before:

Socialbakers relies on the count of total fans in a given day to be able to benchmark different pages. There is however a hidden factor, Facebook’s edge rank algorithm. The overall organic reach is not equal for every piece of content published and over the course of a month it is very likely that the page will only reach a portion of its total number of “fans”. (“Subscribers” is more like it.)

Since Socialbakers can’t access the organic, paid and viral reach of a post it relies on the little public information it has about all pages, number of fans.

And yet, this is the only way we have to benchmark a page against its competitors: not taking into account the investment in facebook sponsored posts and ads or the impact that a particular piece of content might have in regards to the exposure of a content published by brands.

Photo by Frederico Casares

The grain of salt in Engagement Rates

Tue, 05 Nov 2013 14:44:31 +0000

The engagement rate for a Facebook Page is often used as a benchmark for performance against competitors and similar pages. It isn’t however so cut and dry.

Here is how socialbakers determines Engagement Rate:

Facebook does not show a percentage for engagement rate, instead they focus on absolute numbers for Post Clicks and Comments, Likes and Shares.

There are issues with both approaches. For the Socialbakers formula, it doesn’t take into account the fact that people do click links and go to a website where they can in fact learn more about the brand. This is more of a technological limitation, given that they have access to those figures.

Both formulas for engagement don’t take into account the different reach of a facebook post. From experience, we know that facebook shows a Page’s updates to around 30% of the total number of people who have subscribed to its updates, and this percentage is influenced by sponsored posts and other ad formats facebook offers.

Now imagine that every once in a while you sponsored a post aimed at people who subscribed to your page, in fact countering the edge rank algorithm. The obvious conclusion is that your engagement rate will rise, no matter which formula you use.

For me this is a symptom of a bigger issue, that the overall average of engagement rate will be in correlation with the overall advertising investment of brands in facebook. So if you’re benchmarking your presence on Facebook in relation to competitors or even the average of the sector, do use that information with a grain of salt, considering that there is a percentage of investment which is unknown.

Photo by Mike Scoltock

Digital Insanity Magazine by Bruno Amaral

Why Socialbakers’ Engagement Rate is not a solid metric

The grain of salt in Engagement Rates