Free Engagement Rate Calculator
Your rate by reach and by followers — and a straight answer on whether it’s good for your platform.
- No signup
- Nothing uploaded
- 8 platforms
- A verdict, not just a number
Example · an Instagram carousel
At or above the Instagram bar
5.69% of the people who saw it engaged — at or above the bar, and 1.4× the 4% a typical Instagram account lands near.
Saves are doing the heavy lifting at 1.38% of reach — the post is useful enough to come back to.
Put your own post in on the left — yours appears here.
Get the benchmark cheat sheet — every platform’s typical rate, the save and share bars, and what to fix when you’re under them.
How it’s calculated
Two engagement rate formulas, and why they disagree.
Add a post’s likes, comments, shares and saves into one number — interactions — then divide by an audience. Which audience you divide by is the whole difference.
Graded · judge a post with this
By reach
interactions ÷ reach × 100
Counts only the people who saw the post, so it measures the post itself. Use it to compare one post with another.
Shown, not graded
By followers
interactions ÷ followers × 100
What a brand works out from your profile, since they can’t see your reach. Most followers never see a given post, so it mixes quality with how far it was shown.
A worked example
One Instagram post, two answers
300 likes+20 comments+25 shares+110 saves=455
5.69% by reach455 ÷ 8,000 people who saw it
3.79% by followers455 ÷ 12,000 followers
Above Instagram’s 4% by reach, below it by followers — only because a third of the followers never saw it. Saves at 1.38% of reach clear the 1.2% bar, so this post is worth keeping.
Too small to grade: under 200 people reached, one extra like moves the rate half a point or more — so the calculator says “not enough to read yet” instead of guessing.
Benchmarks
What a typical account lands near.
Engagement rate by reach, per platform — the same figures the Social Media Content Planner grades every post against, so the two always agree.
A 4% post is ordinary on TikTok and strong on Pinterest. Two more bars sit under every rate: saves at 1.2% and shares at 0.8% of reach.
Graded by platform, not account size — a by-size bar would be a number we can’t stand behind.
| Platform | By reach |
|---|---|
| TikTok | 6% |
| 4% | |
| Threads | 4% |
| YouTube | 3% |
| 3% | |
| 2% | |
| 1.5% | |
| X (Twitter) | 1.5% |
Straight answers
The questions people actually ask.
- What’s a good engagement rate?
- It depends on the platform far more than on any single number. Measured against reach, a typical account lands near 6% on TikTok, 4% on Instagram and Threads, 3% on YouTube and LinkedIn, 2% on Facebook and 1.5% on Pinterest and X. At or above your platform’s figure is a good post; well below it, on several posts in a row, is worth changing something for.
- Why is my engagement rate low?
- Check which rate you’re looking at first. By followers, a post most of your followers never saw looks low even when the people who did see it loved it — read it by reach instead. If it’s low by reach too, look at the mix: a post that earns only likes usually gave people nothing to keep or pass on. Posts people save are useful; posts people share say something they want to be seen saying.
- Does engagement rate matter more than follower count?
- For most decisions, yes. Follower count tells you how many people could see a post; engagement rate tells you whether the ones who did see it cared. Brands pricing a sponsored post look at both, and a smaller account with a strong rate is often the better buy.
- How often should I check it?
- Per post is useful for spotting what worked, but one post is noisy — a single rate can swing on timing alone. The pattern across a month of posts is what to act on. That’s the view the Social Media Content Planner builds for you as you log posts.
For every post, not just this one
Tracking this for every post?
The Social Media Content Planner calculates it automatically and tells you which posts are pulling their weight.