Engagement rate
Definition
Engagement rate: The share of an audience that interacts with a post — commonly likes plus comments on a post, divided by the account's followers.
What it means
Engagement rate turns raw interactions into a figure that can be compared across accounts of different sizes. The version any visitor can compute is (likes + comments) ÷ followers, per post, because those numbers are usually public. Other versions divide by reach or impressions, which usually only the account's owner can see, or add shares and saves. None is wrong; mixing them is.
Two choices decide whether the figure is honest. The first is which post: the median post describes a typical one, while the average is pulled up by a single viral post. The second is how accounts are combined: weight each account's rate by its followers, so a small, lively account does not outrank a large one.
Example
Illustratively, an account with 20,000 followers whose median post draws 300 likes and comments has a median engagement rate of 300 ÷ 20,000 = 1.5%.
Why it matters to an IB
An IB choosing a creator or a sub-IB is buying attention, not a follower count. Engagement rate is the first measure of whether that attention exists — provided the formula is stated, the median is used, and the figure carries the date it was read. See how to read a trading audience honestly.