What is a reasonable engagement rate?
The social media engagement rate is significant because being on social media as a brand is not just about popularity but about making meaningful connections with current and potential customers, which will boost your brand online and offline.
Lerato Monareng 
The engagement rate provides a more accurate representation of content performance than simply looking at absolute measures of social media engagement such as likes, shares, and comments.
Suppose a brand has millions of followers but only receives a few interactions per post. In that case, they’re likely, not producing high-quality content. While a brand that only has a few thousand followers gets tons of shares and comments every time. This will mean high-quality content that would gain a high engagement rate.
What is a reasonable engagement rate?
The truth is that the average engagement rate differs from one social media platform to the next. However, most social media marketing professionals agree that a reasonable engagement rate is between 1% and 5%. The more followers don’t engage with your content, the harder it is to achieve.
However, the best advice I would give you in determining if your engagement rate is good or bad – is that it must be benchmarked against something else and measured against a predefined objective.
Keyhole advises that you consider the following points when determining your engagement rate against a particular benchmark or objective.
- How your content performs in a given period (benchmark against your engagement rate over time)
- Compares your performance against competitors (benchmark against your key competitors)
- Create a benchmark for your industry social media engagement performance (benchmark against top industry players)
- Compare your performance on different social media platforms. (benchmark against your own social media profiles)
Engagement rate pros and cons, as noted by the Corporate finance Institute.
Engagement rate pros:
- Gauges the level of audience interaction
- Gains insight into the quality of the content
- Provides a more accurate representation of content performance than simply looking at absolute individual measures such as the number of likes, comments, shares, etc. It is a more comprehensive metric
Engagement rate cons:
- The engagement rate is unable to differentiate between interactions that are more important than others. For example, an individual may consider a “share” on a Facebook page more important than a “like.” However, the engagement metric does not account for that – both interactions are “equal” in the calculation.
- The metric must be customized to provide deeper insight
