What is LinkedIn engagement rate?

Dividing by impressions rather than by follower count is what makes the number useful. Raw engagement counts mostly measure how far a post travelled, so a mediocre post with wide reach can out-score a strong one shown to fewer people. Engagement rate isolates whether the people who actually saw it cared.

Comments and shares are worth more than reactions, both to your audience and to the ranking system, because they cost the reader more. A post with 20 comments and 40 likes is usually doing more for you than one with 300 likes and silence underneath it.

Computing it takes nothing more than the per-post analytics LinkedIn already shows: add reactions, comments, and reposts, divide by impressions, and multiply by a hundred. Over a month of posts, prefer the median to the mean. One post that travels unusually far will drag an average upward and make every normal post look like a failure against it.

Benchmarks are a starting point and nothing more. The number worth tracking is your own average over the last few months, since your audience, your industry, and your posting rhythm move the baseline more than any published benchmark does.

Its real use is as a comparison instrument. Held against your own baseline it will tell you which topics and formats your audience actually responds to, and that comparison only stays honest between like and like: carousels against carousels, text against text, because formats carry different baseline rates before the writing does anything at all.

It is also a rate, which means it moves when either number moves. A post can look worse simply because it reached further, so read it next to impressions rather than on its own.