Engagement is the umbrella word for everything an audience does with your content: likes, comments, shares, saves, replies, taps. It is what platforms sell to advertisers, what feeds rank by, and what everyone really means when they say an account is alive.
Not all engagement weighs the same. The rule platforms and people both follow: the more effort an action costs, the more it means.
Feeds are auctions for attention, and engagement is the bid. Content that provokes actions earns distribution, distribution earns more actions, and that loop is the entire flywheel of social media.
It's also the meeting point of bought and organic growth. Delivered counts furnish the LOOK of engagement, which changes how people treat the account. Ongoing engagement comes from content and audience. Winning accounts keep the two in believable proportion, and the engagement rate is the public audit of exactly that.
Check the numbers against each other, not alone: comments against views, story views against followers, shares against likes.
Real audiences produce messy, proportional numbers. Manufactured ones produce clean, lopsided numbers. Everyone who evaluates accounts professionally, from brands to buyers of accounts' promotion, reads the proportions first.
For ranking: saves, shares and comments, in roughly that neighbourhood, because they cost the most effort. For human credibility: comments, because attention talks.
Make content that invites a response: questions, opinions, useful material worth saving. Reply early to comments. And check formats in your analytics; one format usually out-engages the rest by a wide margin.
Related terms
Every definition lives in the full glossary, and the services behind the vocabulary are on the services page.