How To Unlock The Right Engagement Formula for your Creative

We often hear our users talk about how tough it is to pin down audience engagement on a brand’s creative content. Interestingly, the debate is not centered around whether engagement itself is a useful metric. In truth, users mentally tussle over what goes where – the math, formulas, numerators and denominators.

At Unmetric, we understand that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach towards engagement. One day, you are a brand with 73 million Fans benchmarking your engagement to a competitor with 10 million Fans and then you get asked, “How do you account for that difference in Fan numbers?”. At other times, you are just interested in how well shared your new campaign’s creative was on Facebook, compared to your team’s earlier efforts to drive virality – How do you make your Shares count towards your engagement numbers above all else?

We believe the answer lies in how you customize your engagement score.

Step 1: Pin down what’s important to you.

Last year, M.A.C Cosmetics ran a ‘Live Chat’ series with Senior Make Up Artists. While they had a separate Facebook app for the chat itself, let’s imagine M.A.C also wanted to compare how engaging their Facebook posts around each Live Chat series were as conversation starters on their Page. Let’s take a look at how two Live Chat campaigns compare at the start.

Live Chat with Mariam Khairallah appears to have been pretty popular with an Engagement Score of 114 and 92 Comments.

Look at that! Live Chat with Michelle-Lee Collins got a lower Engagement score of 61, but raw numbers show that this series did better on the Comments thread.

So, how do you compare the two creative efforts such that the engagement you most value, in this case – Comments, get the importance they deserve?

Step 2: Customize your Engagement Score formula.

Head over the to the Settings Page and under the Engagement Score tab, change the weights associated with Comments.

I weighed Comments with a factor of 10 and reduced the weight of Shares to a 1.

Step 3: Benchmark Engagement Scores.

Let’s take a look at the new Engagement Scores for the same campaigns but which are now more aligned with our goals.

Live Chat with Mariam Khairallah still did great with an Engagement Score of 2,772.

Here’s what’s interesting though – When we weigh Comments more, we can see that the Live Chat with Michelle-Lee Collins did comparably well but still not as great as the other Live Chat series overall.

This paints a more accurate picture of engagement of the Live Chat series than our earlier choice of formula did. As a result, you now have defensible numbers that you can take and run with at that next team meet to plan content.

Head over to the Unmetric platform to customize your Engagement Score formula now.