By comparing your social media performance to that of your rivals and/or industry norms, you may undertake social media benchmarking.
Using social media benchmarks, you may compare data directly related to your company’s performance, such as follower numbers, post reach, engagement rates, posting times, etc.
What are Social Media Benchmarks?
Benchmarking refers to contrasting your performance with industry norms, direct rivals, or past results. It aids in defining success and the measures you’ll use to assess and comprehend your present version, forecast your future performance, and make adjustments.
Therefore, social media benchmarking is comparing your present social media performance to industry norms, your rivals, and your past success. You may monitor and compare significant social media indicators, including engagement and reach followers, and more, through social media benchmarks.
The Importance of Social Media Benchmarks
Your social media marketing strategies will succeed if you monitor your performance using social media benchmarks. Without social media benchmarks, brands struggle to understand how they compare to their rivals. Without this knowledge, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to make any significant changes to your marketing approach.
Benchmarking can be very advantageous for your brand. The first benefit is that it enables you to enhance your content strategy and concentrate on information that affects your target audience.
You can uncover the areas of your messaging that require improvement by employing competition analysis as part of your social media benchmarking process because you and your competitors are marketing to the same demographic.
On the other side, if you carry on without establishing social media benchmarks, you won’t have the clarity necessary to create a successful social media marketing strategy. It’s like shooting a gun in the dark at a target; you know the target is there, but you’ll waste a lot of time and effort attempting to hit it.
The following three points can help you enhance your social media marketing due to social media benchmarks.
- Make attainable goals
You get a lot clearer idea of how you can utilize social media to grow your business when you have a complete awareness of where you, your rivals, and your industry stand in terms of performance. This will assist you in creating objectives that are practical and based on social media benchmarks that you can raise (as it is useless and unlikely to strive for 5+ million followers when the average industry participant has less than 100K).
- Inform Your Approach
You may develop a content plan that capitalizes on your advantages if you are aware of how your social media marketing initiatives are faring in comparison to those of your rivals or your sector. You’ll understand that it is data-driven.
- Evaluate Your Results
Benchmarks for social media performance are beneficial for assessing how well your marketing strategies are performing. This results in some beautiful things.
To begin with, you’ll feel more confident in your marketing plan since you can base strategic decisions on data and notice changes in your performance. Setting realistic objectives is related to this since you may assess your performance using the data you’ve gathered and utilize that knowledge to reevaluate or modify your goals.
The importance of social media benchmarking solutions
To claim that social media is overgrowing would be inaccurate. It has grown and has entered the mainstream. Businesses that don’t use social media as a marketing tool will be seen as unimportant and perhaps even left out.
But I’m sure you already knew that. Social media has completely changed the way we interact with one another and conduct business, and it is now essential for building solid relationships with your clients.
Millennials and Gen Z. These days do not just use social media, people of all ages use social media, and a wide range of topics flourish there. Exciting and potent solutions will undoubtedly become marketable given the current dynamic environment.
Even though social media is a potential marketing tool, it is crucial to comprehend its effects. The best social media strategies in the world cannot be “eyeballed.”They necessitate extensive research, analysis, and interpretation.
Fortune 500 firms have adapted and are now developing a distinctive, effective social media strategy on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, which calls for close attention to detail and a solid understanding of platform dynamics.
What should you be aiming for with social media benchmarking?
- Goal-oriented benchmarking
The key to aspirational benchmarking is to think broadly. With this strategy, you should use metrics from business titans or highly regarded organizations (think Fortune 500 or Inc 5000).
In contrast, you may concentrate on smaller businesses that you find very impressive, like those on the Forbes Small Giants list.
Where can you get these firms’ social media metrics? Fortunately, some studies that employ information from leading firms offer a peek into their performance statistics.
A fantastic resource for the most recent studies that can help with your benchmarking attempts is Google Scholar.
- Benchmarking by earnings
This second approach is mainly targeted at sponsored advertising. Your best-performing ad campaigns would be evident if you had previously conducted a social media audit.
You can then use those indicators as benchmarks moving forward once you’ve determined which campaigns are the strongest.
- Benchmarking of competitors
Because you’ll be evaluating yourself against other businesses, this strategy is comparable to aspirational benchmarking (or influencers). The critical distinction is that you should pick your niche’s most direct rivals. You can most likely name your primary rivals off the top of your head.
Using Facebook Insights, extracting high-level information about other business pages is simple. You may quickly view another page’s weekly engagement statistics, new page likes, and additional information with the “Pages to Watch” function.
You can manually check the number of followers, likes, and comments your rivals have on other platforms (like Twitter and Instagram) to gauge their level of involvement.
Using these three benchmarking strategies, you may position your social media performance numbers into a helpful perspective. There’s no need to stick with a single process. Instead, you can use all three, which will give you various viewpoints.
You’ll also have a better idea of where you are now and where you want to be once you’ve created your standards.
How to Do Social Media Benchmarking
We have a seven-step process you may utilize to get started, even though there is no one way to approach social media benchmarks and the process of benchmarking.
Step 1: Find Your Why
Determine what you’re evaluating and why social media benchmarking is necessary before you start taking any measurements. To do this, you must first analyze your social media requirements to determine what is lacking.
Do you need to reevaluate your content strategy, or will you focus on engagement rates? Your data collection and analysis will aid in determining the best course of action for your social media marketing.
Step 2: Set Goals
After deciding what to concentrate on, it’s time to make goals—measurable objectives. If you own an online store and are aware of your conversion rate, for example, you might be motivated to boost website traffic because doing so will probably increase conversions.
Your focus may be on interaction and growing your following if you’re looking to improve brand affinity and create a community. Connecting every aspect of your social media benchmarking strategy to your established objectives is crucial.
Step 3: Know Your Competitors
Keeping track of your competitors’ activities is critical because you probably have much in common with them. An analysis of the competition can help you with this.
There are several types of rivals to consider, though. Direct rivals are companies who offer the same services to your target market as you do. Those who compete in your market yet suggest different services are considered indirect competitors.
Replacement competitors are rivals who operate in a different market sector then you but whose goods may be used in your place.
Competitors who don’t now serve your market but might in the future are considered potential competitors. When conducting social media benchmarking, you must consider each of your rivals in light of your own company’s objectives.
As you are benchmarking, consider your business’s long-term goals as well. It is appropriate to broaden your definition of a rival if, for example, you have ambitions to scale your firm so that your social media benchmarks align with your objectives.
Step 4: Select the Best Social Media Sites
It’s time to choose the social media networks you’ll utilize for benchmarking at this point. An essential distinction to make in this situation is that you are choosing the social media sites you will benchmark, not the social media platforms you will employ for social media marketing.
Look at your list of competitors and make a note of the platforms they are employing. What platforms are they most successful on? It would help if you considered your audience and their social media channels in addition to your rivals.
Step 5: Create and Document Actionable Insights
Many marketers make mistakes at this point. Gathering all this data and information is one thing, but putting it to use is quite another.
Now that you have the information you require, it’s time to analyze the data and draw conclusions that can be put to use. Record your findings from each of the initial processes in writing, as well as your suggestions for your social media plan.
Actionable insight examples include the following:
While our rivals’ Facebook posts receive more engagement, their Instagram postings reach a wider audience.
To raise brand awareness, we’ll concentrate on posting on Instagram, and we’ll use Facebook to promote our website.
Since video content in our sector has a 3X higher engagement rate than images, we should post at least one video to social media every week.
Among our rivals, our competitor has the highest Instagram engagement rate. They combine user-generated content, videos, and motivational quotations in their content. Therefore we should start incorporating these into our plan. Your goals should be directly tied to the insights you develop
Step 6: Put into Practice, Assess, and Modify
Implementation, evaluation, and adjustment are the final steps in this procedure. Here is where you apply your knowledge.
However, you can’t stop there. You must continually assess and modify your practical insights to maximize the value of your social media benchmarks.
In conclusion
In the end, you want to outperform your rivals, so keep an eye on what they’re doing and pick up tips from their achievements, inventions, and errors.
You’ll need a benchmarking solution if you want to improve your social strategy by learning what’s effective and what isn’t.
By comparing, benchmarking, and evaluating your social performance, our benchmarking tool may assist your team in making decisions in real-time.
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