If you read my previous post about calculating engagement, you'll know that tracking how engaged your audience is is vital to understanding how well you're doing at this social media gig. A low engagement rating (or ER) suggests that your content is not resonating with your followers. A high ER indicates that what you're posting is what your audience wants to see - so continue the good work.

Another great metric that will be really useful to understanding how well your online platform is performing is measuring your follower growth. Again, it's pretty simple to calculate:

Say you started the month with 1025 followers and have gained 54 in the last 30 days, simply take the number of new followers (54), divide it by the total number of followers you had at the start of that period (1025) and multiply it by 100 to get a percentage. So:

54 / 1025 x 100 = 5.3% growth.

Now that kind of growth could be great or poor depending on the time frame you're measuring it in: for example, 5.3% growth is good if it's taken place over a month, but it's terribly poor if it's taken place over a 12 month period.

So here is a rating scale over a month-long period which should help you clarify where your follower growth might be sitting:

Very Poor: < 0% (i.e. at this level, not only have you NOT grown followers, but you've lost a few too. Yikes!)
Poor: 0% - 2.5%
Fair: 2.51% - 5%
Great: 5.01% - 7.5% (< Incidentally, this is where the average growth sits on Instagram)
Excellent: 7.51% + (boom - smashing it)

Now, don't go out and buy a heap of followers: remember, it's about quality not quantity. Focus on steady follower growth as opposed to the audience number itself.

So did your follower growth rank? Some room for improvement? We can help: info@shoutandco.com