To be successful on LinkedIn, there is one element you will need to pay attention to: the LinkedIn engagement rate. What is it about? Response elements.
For your LinkedIn posts to take off and get thousands of views, there’s no secret: you’re going to have to generate what we call engagement. That is, reactions from your audience on LinkedIn, so that your LinkedIn post can be shown to a wider audience. As we said when recalling the importance of understanding how the LinkedIn algorithm works , it is these interactions that will make LinkedIn decide to promote your post to as wide an audience as possible.
Calculate the LinkedIn engagement rate: how to do it?
To calculate the engagement rate on LinkedIn, you must first take into account all the possible interactions on a post: likes, comments and shares. Shares no longer really have the wind in their sails on LinkedIn, because the social network favors publications that benefit from a lot of likes and comments, but shares are well accounted for in the engagement rate.
To calculate the LinkedIn engagement rate, the formula is therefore very simple:
Engagement rate calculation = (Number of likes + number of comments + number of shares) divided by the number of views.
Or, to simplify the formula for calculating the engagement rate:
Engagement rate calculation = Total number of interactions divided by the total number of views.
You will come across a result which must be expressed as a percentage.
Let’s take an example. In the post below, we see that we have 60 likes and 40 comments. We also know from the Shield software that we have two shares. We deduce the number of interactions:
60 likes + 40 comments + 2 shares = 101 interactions.
And by the time we perform the engagement rate calculation, we see that the post has generated 4845 views. We can therefore calculate the LinkedIn engagement rate of this post:
101 interactions / 4845 views = 0.0208, or 2.08% engagement rate.
We also note that the Shield software announces a 2.1% engagement rate for this post, which proves the accuracy of the calculation, the difference being justified by a rounding or a very slightly different number of views at the time of calculation. In summary, you must remember that the engagement rate allows you to know if your post has aroused the interest of your community, so it is a very good indicator to know if your LinkedIn post has been appreciated or not.
What is the right LinkedIn engagement rate?
The engagement rate can vary depending on several factors: the size of your community, the number of views of your post, etc. It is very difficult to say categorically that there is a commitment rate that must be achieved, it would not make sense. You will also see why the engagement rate alone is not enough to measure the quality of a LinkedIn post.
Example #1: A LinkedIn post with 100,000 views
We are here in the presence of a LinkedIn post having achieved 100,000 views. The post generated 871 likes and 197 comments. We’ll spare you the math: the LinkedIn engagement rate here is 1.04% (a figure validated by Shield). In absolute terms, this rate can be described as low. But it is explained by the fact that this post generated so many interactions that it ended up going viral. And the more the number of views increases, the more the engagement rate will decrease due to the volume of views generated by the post.
Example n°2: a LinkedIn post with less than 1000 views
In this second example, Thomas’s LinkedIn post (shown below) only got 728 views and generated an engagement rate that was very similar to our previous example: the engagement rate here is 0.82%. But the explanation is totally different: this time, the post simply did not generate interactions and few views, it did not go viral due to its very low engagement. You can read this post in full on LinkedIn.
So here we have two LinkedIn posts with two quite similar engagement rates, but a vastly different number of views and interactions. It must therefore be understood that the engagement rate is not enough to judge the quality of a post: a LinkedIn post that has 100,000 views is rather a good thing, even if its engagement rate seems modest at first sight.
Understanding this requires understanding two simple rules about LinkedIn engagement rate:
- If you have no interactions, your LinkedIn engagement rate will be very low and your LinkedIn post will get very few views.
- If your LinkedIn post is very successful, its engagement rate will initially be very high, then LinkedIn will continue to distribute your post, but to an audience that will be less and less qualified and who will not interact. After a while, the number of views will be so high that your LinkedIn engagement rate will naturally decrease on that high-reach LinkedIn post.
This explains why these two Posts ultimately have a fairly similar engagement rate, but with radically different results in terms of reach (also known as “LinkedIn reach”).
But what would be a good average LinkedIn engagement rate on a LinkedIn post?
If you have read the previous paragraph correctly, we reiterate the conclusion: it is frustrating, but we cannot draw a general conclusion. From the experience that we have in SEO for Banks, we nevertheless note that a post which manages to make a good score revolves around 2% of engagement rate. An average engagement rate is around 1.3 to 1.8%.
We are not talking about posts like the famous “Click on the dolphin” which is a huge mistake on LinkedIn because it is a low quality post and which “traps” its audience. Committing to get views at all costs is therefore not a good idea either. Your objective (and ours) is therefore to imagine posts that will allow you to have engagement and generate views without falling into controversy, which would be a bad strategy.
Know your engagement rate easily
But how do you know your engagement rate when knowing your stats on LinkedIn is a bit of a cross and a banner? When it comes to stats, LinkedIn only provides you with views of your post and number of views of your profile. It’s a bit limited if you really want to know if you’re progressing.
So of course, to know your engagement rate, you could have fun doing it by hand by calculating the engagement rate presented a few lines above. But you will have to do it for each post, which will quickly become quite off-putting. You will therefore need a tool for calculating the engagement rate. At SEO BRISK, we manage our customers’ figures using the Shield software. Relatively easy to access, it provides you with a full battery of indicators that will let you know if your communication is moving in the right direction. Among these indicators, there is of course your engagement rate on LinkedIn. As such, some explanations are necessary on the reading of this figure on Shield.
By observing the graph below, one would think that the engagement rate is 0%, a dismal score. But no, that’s not the case. In fact, the engagement rate is calculated per day, based on the posts published. On this graph, no posts were published on January 11, so the engagement rate on January 11 is estimated to be 0%.
But if we pass the mouse cursor over January 9, the date of the last post by Thomas, one of our co-founders, we then come across a figure of 2.04%, which corresponds to the engagement generated on the last post. It is therefore important to remember that the engagement rate on Shield is calculated on the day you published a post. On days you don’t post, your LinkedIn engagement rate will automatically be zero, even if people like or comment on your last post.
But how to improve your LinkedIn engagement rate?
RECOMMENDATION N°1: USE IMAGES AND VIDEOS ON LINKEDIN (UPDATE 2023)
In our experience, the evolution of 2023 content trends on LinkedIn today is quite favorable to content containing visuals (carousel or images, a point we covered in our article on the best social network). Publications accompanied by visual media experience 20% more click-through rates than text alone.
It all depends of course on the quality of the LinkedIn post you will post, but also on the quality of the photo. Forget the posts about Michel’s leaving party or Coralie’s birthday, these photos have absolutely no interest for your audience. If we take the example of the post below, Thomas, one of the founders of SEO BRISK and a LinkedIn specialist, broadcasts a LinkedIn post in which he talks about Porsche’s marketing strategy. This post is accompanied by a photo of several Porsches.
The post stats are as follows:
- Number of views: 5241 views
- Number of interactions: 86
- LinkedIn engagement rate: 1.64%
These figures on a single post are not enough to draw a firm and definitive conclusion, but they nevertheless show that good content accompanied by a quality photo will allow you to increase your LinkedIn engagement rate.
