What is Engagement Rate?

Engagement rate expresses how much interaction a post earned relative to how many times it was shown. LinkedIn does not publish one official formula; the common convention divides total engagements, meaning reactions, comments, shares, and sometimes clicks, by impressions, then multiplies by 100 to get a percentage. Because definitions vary from marketer to marketer, the honest way to use the metric is internal comparison: compute it the same way every time and compare your own posts across weeks to learn which topics and formats your audience actually answers. Chasing universal benchmark numbers is mostly noise, since rates swing with audience size, niche, format, and how each tool counts an engagement. Comments generally signal more than reactions because they cost the reader real effort, so many practitioners weight them mentally even when the formula counts everything equally. The engagement rate calculator does the arithmetic and keeps your formula consistent from post to post, which is the whole game.