An Ultimate Guide To Social Media Benchmarking

It is important for businesses to evaluate how their social media efforts compare to those of their rivals. This latter group has been in the forefront of closing the digital divide, and their efforts have resulted in significant economic progress.

Care, efficient monitoring, and an honed strategy are all necessities for every social engagement platform. If you want to know where your business stands in the marketplace, you need to take a data-driven strategy to social media.

Using social media as a barometer could help us find solutions to problems and lessen the burden of difficulties. As a result of using these kinds of engagement measurements, a number of cutting-edge businesses have contributed significantly to the expansion of their field.

You probably have some inquiries if you’re thinking about using a social media platform, or if you’re unfamiliar with social media engagement benchmarks and would like to learn more.

Join me as we examine each of these options.

What makes social media benchmarking tools so crucial?

Suggesting that social media is quickly growing might be misleading. It’s reached critical mass and is widely adopted. If a company doesn’t use social media to promote itself, it risks being written off as irrelevant.

It’s safe to assume that you already knew that.

With the rise of social media’s pervasiveness in everyday life and in the business world, it’s clear that maintaining active profiles on these platforms is crucial to fostering meaningful connections with your clientele.

The use of social media is not exclusive to the millennial and Gen Z generations. Nowadays, people of all ages are active on social media, which fosters the development of a wide range of conversations and debates. There is little doubt that in such a dynamic present, effective and novel solutions will be developed and made available.

Although social media can be used as a marketing strategy on its own, it is crucial to be aware of its effects. Social media best practises can’t be “eyeballed,” even if you have eyes in the back of your head. They call for copious amounts of research, analysis, and interpretation.

Successful social media marketing on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram demands careful planning and an understanding of each platform’s unique nuances if a Fortune 500 company is to compete.

How do you measure success on social media?

Using social media benchmarking to put your engagement figures in context is an excellent idea. Brand awareness is one objective of social media that cannot be easily monetized. If this is the case, you can utilise benchmarking to assess the intangible value you’re gaining from your social media efforts.

Here are three methods of comparison that might give your social analytics some background.

Using a goal-oriented standard

When setting aspirational benchmarks, the sky’s the limit. With this strategy, you should compare your own performance to that of market leaders or highly admired organisations (think Fortune 500 or Inc 5000). You may, alternatively, zero in on smaller businesses that you find particularly impressive, like the ones that made Forbes’ list of Small Giants.

If you’re interested in how successful these businesses have been on social media, where can you look for such information? The good news is that there are a plethora of studies that utilise data from successful businesses, giving us an insight into their performance metrics. For the most up-to-date research that can help you set benchmarks, use Google Scholar.

Earned comparisons

The emphasis of this second approach is on sponsored promotion. If you had done a social media audit beforehand, you’d know which of your advertising initiatives was the most successful. You can utilise the analytics from your most successful ads as guidelines for future endeavours.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that your audit uncovered a discrepancy between the channel average of 0.7% and your best-performing Facebook campaign’s CTR of 3%. The average CTR (globally) could be brought closer to 3% if this were the case. And let’s say you’re content with a CTR of 2% overall. Then, when your budget increases, you might use a CTR target of 2%.

Benchmarking against rivals

It’s comparable to aspirational benchmarking because it involves evaluating performance against external standards (or influencers). Here, though, you’ll want to focus on the most direct rivals in your particular field. You probably know who your major rivals are without even thinking about it.

Using Facebook Insights, you can quickly gather broad statistics about competing company pages. You may keep tabs on another page’s weekly interaction rate, number of new page likes, and other analytics with the “Pages to Watch” tool.

If you use one of these three benchmarking methods, you can put your social media performance metrics into perspective. It’s not necessary to settle on a single strategy. Instead, you can use all three to gain a variety of viewpoints.

And after you’ve set your standards, you’ll have a much better idea of where you are and where you want to be.

To what extent should social media metrics be compared against one another?
You’ve brought up a really pertinent point.

We need the word “what” here. As a result, you might not need to measure every metric under the sun if you’re using a social media platform that’s designed to achieve a certain aim. But there are data points that apply to most businesses, and these are extremely helpful for social media analysts who need to compare their results to industry norms.

Let’s pretend you’ve shared a photo of your cat dressed as a newborn Yoda on several social media sites.

Henceforth, we shall refer to the number of interactions with that particular image (including responses, retweets, likes, comments, and shares) as your Engagement.

On the other side, the number of people who have seen an image thanks to social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on is referred to as the social media reach.

The number of times an image has been viewed by social media users is measured in what is called “impressions.”

Conclusion

Your ultimate goal should be to gain an advantage over the competition by studying their strategies and applying what you learn to your own business.

You need a benchmarking solution to learn what parts of your social media strategy are succeeding and what parts are falling flat.

By comparing, evaluating, and monitoring your social performance in real time, our benchmarking tool may aid your team in making informed decisions.