How to Calculate your Competitor’s Engagement Rates on Facebook

One of the biggest problems marketers working with social media face is quantifying success and benchmarking competitors. It’s no different for book publishers or authors; you want to easily understand your progress, so you an evaluate whether it’s the correct digital stream for your book.

Well, taking a cue from Avinash Kaushik, we’re going to show you how to easily benchmark your competitor’s engagement rates on Facebook – and your own. Here’s how:

Applause, Amplification and Conversation

The three steps to engagement success on any social network are applause, amplification and conversation. In terms of Facebook engagement, here’s a definition of each one:

Applause
The amount of likes an object (a status update/photo/video/link) receives on Facebook.

Amplification
The amount of times the object is shared.

Conversation
The amount of comments received per object.

Why are these metrics important? Well , in terms of Facebook, ‘applause’ and ‘conversation’ will influence your Facebook Edgerank, so your updates are more likely to appear more regularly in user’s newsfeeds and ‘amplification’ means your content is being shared by users, improving your visibility. The obvious importance of all three metrics is that, the higher they are, the more engaging your page is. Provided you craft relevant content, high applause, amplification and conversation rates will mean that you’re getting the most out of social media.

So, if you head over to a Facebook page – in this example, we’ll use Kindle’s page – you can see that it’s very easy to calculate all three engagement metrics. Here’s a sample post:

As you can see, 65 have applauded it, 2 have amplified it and 15 have engaged in a conversation about it. However, these raw numbers aren’t of huge interest to us. In order to make sense of the numbers, we need another piece of data to compare them with, which will allow us to normalise each metric. In this case, we’ll treat the amplified, applause and conversation numbers as conversions – our ‘impressions’ will be the total amount of users that have liked the page.

So:

65 Applause / 2,007,277 fans = 0.003% Applause rate

2 Amplifications / 2,007,277 page likes = 0.00009% Amplification rate

15 Conversations / 2,007,277 page likes = 0.0007% Conversation rate

You can then run this for each page, as well as your own, and see how you compare.