Understanding The Engagement Rate in Social Game Marketing

When marketing and promoting your game on social media, one key metric to monitor is your engagement rate. On all of the content posted through our platform's social scheduler, you will notice this metric as seen below.

This essential performance indicator reflects how many people interact with your content through actions like comments, likes, shares, and more. A strong engagement rate signals that your audience is interested in your content, making it a vital tool in social game marketing.

In this article, we'll cover:

• A common mistake in calculating engagement rate.
• How engagement rate exposes fake followers.
• How to use engagement rate to refine your content strategy.

How To Correctly Calculate Engagement Rate

A widely circulated formula for calculating engagement rate is:Engagement Rate = (Total Engagements / Total Followers) x 100.

However, this method is flawed because it includes followers who may never even see your content. On average, only 2% to 15% of your followers will see a given post.

To illustrate why this method doesn’t make sense, think of buying a highway billboard ad. Your ad will only exist in one spot on the highway. Now imagine you measured engagement based on people driving on a completely different highway 100 miles away, who never even saw your billboard. It wouldn’t make sense.

Engagement rate should instead be calculated as:(Level of Engagement [e.g., Likes, Comments, Hearts] / Number of Impressions) x 100.

This formula more accurately measures the quality of your content based on the people who actually saw it, whether they follow you or not. Another important number to track is reach. Based on your follower count, reach measures how many people your content reaches. You can calculate this using:(Impressions / Followers) x 100.

However, keep in mind that not everyone your content reaches is necessarily your follower. This number is a rough estimate.

How Engagement Rate Identifies Fake Followers

Did you know engagement rate can reveal if an account has fake followers or bots? Let’s break it down.

When content is posted, engagement follows a natural progression over time. Look at the chart below from one of our gaming clients that use our social media scheduler for tracking data:

Notice how engagement starts high and naturally falls off. Social platforms usually show your content to your most avid followers first—those who are more likely to engage. This initial engagement boosts the rate early on and can indicate to the algorithms if it show your content to more people. As the content ages, it is shown to a broader audience, which may not be as engaged. Over time, as fewer people interact with it, the engagement rate drops.

If an account has many fake followers or bots, the engagement rate will start low and remain consistently weak. This reduces the likelihood of algorithms promoting the content to a wider audience, leading to fewer impressions.

This is particularly important if you want to hire influencers to promote your game. Somes studies have shown that 49% of influencers have, at some point, purchased followers. If you pay them to promote your game, you risk paying for exposure to a fake audience, which won’t result in new users for you.

How Engagement Helps Determine the Best Types of Content

Tracking engagement rate is invaluable for identifying what types of content resonate with your audience. Once you’ve developed a consistent and well-planned strategy can reveal actionable insights over time.

Developing consistent strategy should take at least one month and include a minimum of 20 posts of varying types. For game marketing, common content types include:

• Artwork
• Gameplay
• Dev Logs
• Giveaways
• Memes
• Etc.

As you post over an extended period, patterns will emerge. For example, with some of our gaming clients, we’ve found that some audiences engage most with short, 1-minute dev logs, while other game audiences prefer memes. These preferences vary depending on the audience and platform and take time to identify.

Measuring the success of your content and platform through engagement rate will help you understand what you should produce more of and what doesn’t resonate.

The Purpose Of Engagement Rate

Engagement rate is more than just a number—it’s a window into how your audience interacts with your content and a powerful tool for shaping your marketing strategy. By calculating it correctly and using it to evaluate both your content's effectiveness and the authenticity of influencers, you can make smarter decisions that lead to real connections with your audience. Whether you're refining your content strategy or choosing the right partners to promote your game, understanding engagement rate will help you cut through the noise and focus on what truly works. Remember, building genuine engagement takes time, consistency, and a willingness to learn from your audience. Keep experimenting, keep analyzing, and watch your game's community grow.