Engagement rate

Which version should you use?

By followers tells you how engaged your audience is for its size, so it suits comparing accounts. By views tells you how good the post was for the reach it got, so it suits comparing posts. On short-video platforms most views often come from people who don't follow you, which makes the by-views version the fairer one for a single post.

What counts as good?

Published benchmarks disagree because they count different interactions and different kinds of accounts. The most useful comparison is with your own recent posts: work out the average of your last ten and see which posts beat it, and why.

Related terms

• Audience retention

  Audience retention shows how many viewers are still watching at each moment of a video, usually as a graph from the first second to the last.

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• Posting cadence

  Posting cadence is how often and how regularly you publish, for example three short videos a week on set days.

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• Call to action (CTA)

  A call to action is the one thing a video asks the viewer to do next, such as follow, comment, visit the link or book.

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