How to Calculate TikTok Engagement Rate

The equation for TikTok Engagement is:

Standard Engagement Rate = Engagements ÷ Video Views

Follower Engagement Rate = Engagements ÷ Followers

Where Do I Get These Numbers?

Anyone can find any of these numbers for any account. If you go to someone’s profile you can see how many followers they have and how many video views each video has. Click on any video and you can see likes and comments, and you can see shares for a video from the main feed.

This is all a bit inconvenient though, so if you want the easy-to-find set of stats (just for your own account), you’ll have to upgrade to a business account. It’s free to do, and once you have you’ll have access to Creator Tools, which includes an Analytics section.

Once in the Analytics section, you can find all of your engagements, video views and followers in one place. There are also a whole host of other stats and charts, and you can look at specific date ranges too.

Alternate Calculations

Some agencies have tried to combine both types of engagement to cover all their bases. They use the equation:

I can understand the logic here to an extent – it’s a way to show what the engagement rate might be for any given video. But it doesn’t actually make sense. Let me explain with some examples of profile types:

While these numbers are only examples, they demonstrate why this equation doesn’t work.

TikTok is great for giving everyone an even footing – a small account can go viral just as easily as a big one. That makes followers count more or less just a way of measuring brand value.

So what this equation tells you is that having more followers is a bad thing. Also posting more videos is a bad thing.

Or to put it another way – an account that rarely posts and no one likes but which has one great video is apparently doing much better than one with a lot of followers, likes, and videos.

What is the average TikTok Engagement Rate?

As always, the best benchmark is your own past performance. However, if you are looking to compare yourself to something, here are some averages:

Standard Engagement Rate: According to a study by Statista in 2020, TikTok posts had an average engagement rate of 17.5%.

Doing this will also reduce your chances of being automatically being marked as spam – as Follower Engagement Rate: According to Adage, TikTok influencers had an average engagement rate of 11.83%. However, estimates for this measure vary wildly with some saying between 3-9% and some saying 17-23% (depending on the number of followers an account has).