Engagement Rate
Engagement rate doesn't measure how many people find you interesting. It measures how many, among those who saw you, did something more than scroll past — a lower bar than it sounds.
“A post generating a hundred passive reactions and a post generating ten comments from decision-makers in your industry have the same engagement rate and completely different value.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryNot all interactions weigh the same
Engagement rate typically aggregates very different interaction types (reactions, comments, shares, clicks) into a single number, treating them as equivalent. In a B2B context, a comment from a relevant industry decision-maker is strategically worth much more than dozens of passive reactions from a generic audience, but standard engagement rate calculation doesn't make this distinction.
A qualitative analysis of who generates the engagement (role, company, industry), not just the aggregate volume, allows distinguishing content that generates surface-level visibility from content that generates conversations with the audience actually relevant to the business.
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: optimizing content to maximize aggregate engagement rate, rewarding divisive or polarizing topics that generate many interactions but from an audience not relevant to the brand's positioning.
Second mistake: comparing engagement rate across different platforms (LinkedIn, X, Instagram) as if they measured the same thing, when interaction definitions and distribution algorithms are structurally different.
Practical Application
A company publishes a polarizing post on a current topic that generates an 8.2% engagement rate, the highest ever recorded on the page. Analyzing the profiles of those who interacted, only 4% belong to the target audience (C-level roles at B2B companies): the next, more technical and less viral post generates a 2.1% engagement rate but with 61% of interactions coming from the target audience, generating 3 direct contact requests versus zero from the viral post.