Add your followers and the numbers from a post (or a batch of posts). You get your engagement rate by followers and by views, a rough benchmark for your size, and the formula behind it. Nothing leaves your browser.
Engagement rate
Engagement is attention. The question is whether it turns into customers.Add one more number and we will tell you which it is.
Engagement rate is the share of your audience that interacts with a post: likes, comments, saves and shares added up, divided by followers (or by views), times 100. As a rough guide, 1 to 3% by followers is typical for many Instagram accounts, and smaller accounts tend to score higher. It varies a lot by niche and platform.
Who this is for: Coaches, consultants, founders and creators checking how their content is really doing.
There are two common formulas. The calculator shows both where it can.
So a post with 120 likes, 14 comments, 9 saves and 4 shares on an account with 5,000 followers has 147 interactions, and 147 divided by 5,000 times 100 is 2.94%. By followers is easy to compare between accounts. By views is fairer on TikTok, YouTube and Reels, where most of your views come from people who do not follow you yet.
There is no official number, and the figures you see quoted shift every year as the apps change. The ranges below are the rough guides we use by follower count. Treat them as a sense check, not a target, because a niche B2B account and a meme page live in different worlds.
| Platform (by followers) | Under 10k | 10k to 100k | Over 100k |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 to 5% | 1 to 3% | 0.5 to 1.5% | |
| TikTok | 4 to 12% | 3 to 9% | 2 to 6% |
| 2 to 6% | 1 to 4% | 0.5 to 2% | |
| YouTube (subscribers) | 1 to 5% | 0.5 to 3% | 0.2 to 2% |
| X | 0.5 to 3% | 0.2 to 1.5% | 0.05 to 0.8% |
The pattern that holds across every platform: the bigger the account, the lower the rate. A small, close audience reacts more. That is one reason small accounts often sell better than their follower count suggests.
On TikTok, judge by views rather than followers. The For You feed shows your videos to strangers, so a video can get 50,000 views on an account with 800 followers, which makes the by-followers rate look absurd. As a rough guide, 3 to 9% of views turning into likes, comments, saves and shares is a healthy range for many accounts. YouTube works the same way, where 2 to 6% by views is a reasonable rough guide. On LinkedIn and X, if you have impressions from your analytics, use those in the views box for the same reason.
Not on its own. Engagement is attention. Customers come from what you do with that attention. We regularly see accounts with strong engagement and almost no enquiries, because there is no path from a post to a purchase. That path usually has four parts:
Our guide on how to turn your audience into customers walks through each part, and the marketing funnels guides show how to build the path behind it.
Use both if you can. By followers is the common public number and lets you compare accounts. By views (or impressions) tells you how well a post landed with the people who actually saw it, which matters more on TikTok, YouTube and Reels where most views come from non-followers.
Ten to twenty recent posts is a good sample. One post can be a fluke in either direction. Leave out anything boosted with ads or anything less than a few days old, because its numbers are still moving.
The standard formula counts them all the same. In practice, saves, shares and comments take more effort than a like, so they are a stronger sign that a post was useful. If two posts have the same rate, the one with more saves and shares is usually the better one.
No. Engagement is attention, not income. To turn it into clients you need a path off the platform: a free resource people can ask for, an email list that follows up, and a clear offer with a next step. Plenty of accounts with great engagement make no sales because that path is missing.
Send us your profile and tell us what you sell. We will show you where attention leaks out before it turns into a lead, and what to fix first. Free, no pitch.