What is the Difference Between a Like and Engagement on Social Media?

Social media has become an incredibly important part of our lives, both personally and professionally. It's a great way to connect with people, share information, and grow your business. When it comes to actually measuring the success of your social media profile or getting the most out of your efforts, it helps to understand the difference between a “like” and “engagement” on social media platforms.

👍🏾 What is a LIKE?

A “like” is one of the most basic forms of engagement you can get on social media. When someone chooses to like one of your posts or pages, it shows that they are interested in what you have posted and want to show their support for it. A like is the simplest form of engagement because all it requires is one click from the user; there is no need for them to comment or interact with you further. Likes also help improve visibility for your posts since more likes can lead to greater reach and impressions for that post across the platform.

However, simply having a large number of likes doesn’t always mean that your posts are engaging users in meaningful ways.

💍 ENGAGE me, please! (Not that kind of engagement 🤦🏾‍♀️)

Back to engaging users in meaningful ways -

Here's where “engagement” comes in—it measures how often people interact with your post beyond just liking it. Engagement can come in many forms such as comments, reactions, shares, and other interactions, such as clicking through links in a post or tagging friends. Engagement takes effort from users; they must actively participate and interact with your content on a deeper level than just clicking a button, making this type of interaction much more valuable than simply getting likes on every post.

Engagement takes effort from users; they must actively participate and interact with your content on a deeper level.

Data isn't Sexy, but Drives Results!

When evaluating the success of any given social media campaign, tracking metrics, such as likes and engagements, will give you valuable insight into what resonates best with users and which types of content get them involved. For example, if you find that certain types of posts generate more likes than others but less engagement overall, then you may want to rethink those kinds of posts moving forward since they aren’t prompting users to participate on a deeper level—which could ultimately result in fewer conversions down the line.

For our clients and ourselves, we use Metricool to evaluate engagement on social media. While you can calculate your engagement metric (aka. engagement rate) using a bit of math, having a tool to do that math for you is one less thing on your list of things to do!

For you math minded people, here's the most common engagement rate formula:

Find the 6 most common engagement rate formulas at this Hootsuite blog post.

Our clients at Blu Emerald Media Services receive a monthly social media report that includes their engagement rate. As a small business, monitoring this metric will always be important no matter what your main social media goal is.

Create an Environment for Meaningful Interactions

Ultimately, understanding the difference between likes and engagement is key when creating an effective social media marketing strategy—likes can give you visibility while engagements provide valuable feedback about what resonates best with users so that you can tailor future social media content accordingly. Knowing these two metrics will help ensure that you are creating content that encourages not just superficial interactions, but also meaningful ones from followers who truly care about your brand and message!

Wondering if your engagement is up to par?

If your social media profile could use a audit to take a look at your metrics - including your engagement rate - it could be time to get a full audit. At Blu Emerald Media, we offer social media audits and consultation services. Click the link below to schedule a free consultation call.