It’s all very well having a Twitter account with lots of followers – but are they really listening? The best way to monitor this is to track their reactions to your posts – this is called “engagement.”

However, there is no one standard formula for measuring engagement. Each platform is different and even on relatively straightforward platforms like Twitter, there is plenty of scope for variation.

In this blog post I want to take Twitter, and look at some of the different formula you can use to measure engagement. Which one you pick will be up to you. Your choice will depend on your context and what you are hoping to achieve with your Twitter channel.

Here’s the list:

1) Total Engagements

Earned @Replies +Earned Retweets +Earned Mentions +Earned Favorites

Perhaps the simplest way to measure engagement is to total up all the engagements on your Twitter channel during a set period.

2) Engagement Deltas

Earned @Replies +Earned Mentions +Earned Retweets + New Followers (by day)

This focuses more on the incremental numbers. It’s disadvantage is that it assumes a consistent amount of activity per day.

3) Basic Engagement Rate

(Earned @Replies +Earned Mentions +Earned Retweets) /  Followers x 100.

This looks at the ratio and calculates what percentage of your followers are engaging with your tweets.

Digital marketing consultant, Erica Kei says that “a good engagement level is between 0.5 and 2.0%”

4) Average Tweet Engagement Rate

((Earned @Replies +Earned Mentions +Earned Retweets) / Tweets ) / Followers x 100.

An Average Tweet Engagement Rate really measures the quality of your content. How many engagements did your tweets get?

While it can be done on an individual tweet basis (engagements per tweet/ number of followers) it is best averaged across all tweets for a period. Scores can range between 0.01% and 1%.

5) Engagement as calculated by Twitter itself

(Clicks +Earned Retweets +Earned Mentions) / Impressions

Twitter has more data to pick from than 3^rd party tools (which don’t have access to click or impression data) so it is able to factor in these important metrics into the calculation. You can access your Twitter engagement scores directly at https://analytics.twitter.com

Breaking down Engagement into Conversation, Amplification and Applause

Avinash Kaushik goes further and defines more advanced ratios that break down engagement into its constituent parts. These are summarised by Shobha Thomas as follows:

6) Conversation Rate.

Because you need to be “social” on social media.
– Earned Replies / Tweets

7) Amplification Rate.

How frequently are you tapping in to your “second level” network? i.e. reaching followers of followers?
–Earned Retweets / Tweets

8) Applause Rate.

Helps you understand what the audience likes.
–Earned Favourites / Tweets

Keeping track of this stuff is hard, which is the best twitter engagement rate to track for you. That’s why we’ve made it easy by creating the Rise Twitter Engagement Club – it automatically keeps track of the most popular engagement metric (Average Engagement Rate) for you and will email you once a week with your score, coupled with a comparative benchmark with others on the board. It’s a great way to start improving your Twitter engagement.