Why You Should Evaluate Your Social Media Performance
The Importance of Social Media Benchmarking
Social media benchmarking is essential for evaluating your performance metrics and gaining actionable insights. It allows you to determine whether your performance is improving or declining over time and provides context for understanding what constitutes success. Without benchmarking, it’s challenging to gauge your social media success or identify areas for improvement.
Two Approaches to Social Media Benchmarking
There are two main ways to benchmark your social media marketing:
- Historical benchmarking: Comparing your performance against yourself over time, such as month-on-month or week-on-week.
- Competitor benchmarking: Evaluating your performance against a group of competitors that you select.
By utilizing these benchmarking approaches, you can gain insights into your performance trends and compare yourself to industry competitors.
Benefits of Social Media Benchmarking
Social media benchmarking offers several advantages for marketers and organizations:
- It provides a framework for evaluating the return on investment (ROI) of social media marketing efforts, ensuring that you can measure interactions and growth in the context of overall performance over time.
- Benchmarking strengthens the case for social media marketing by demonstrating its value as an investment that yields tangible returns, shifting the perception from expense to a valuable asset.
- It offers competitor intelligence, helping you understand which types of content resonate with your target audience and shaping your future social media strategy.
How to Conduct Historical Benchmarking
Engagement Rate (ER) is a popular metric for assessing social media performance. By analyzing your ER month-on-month, you can identify trends and track the evolution of your metrics. Additionally, you can compare performance across different social channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Utilizing broad benchmarks like the Facebook Engagement Rate Benchmark can provide further context and help explain performance changes to stakeholders.
How to Conduct Competitor Benchmarking
Benchmarking against competitors allows you to gain valuable insights and ensure a fair comparison. Rather than relying on industry averages, it’s best to define your own competitors by identifying brands and organizations that target similar audiences. Analyzing individual post performance or profile-level performance of your competitors can give you an idea of their average performance. This information can be used to demonstrate your superiority or set goals to reach or exceed the competitor average.
Integrating Social Benchmarking into Reporting
Social media benchmarking should be an ongoing practice integrated into your regular reporting. By incorporating historical and competitor benchmarks, you provide stakeholders with valuable context and support your arguments with data-driven insights. This enables more informed decision-making regarding resource allocation, content quality, publishing frequency, and paid social spending.
By leveraging social media benchmarking, you can continuously improve your social media performance and position AI Source Hub as a partner in delivering effective AI-powered digital marketing solutions. Contact us today to learn more or explore our other blog posts for further insights.
