It would help if you established your business goals before you can turn social media data into actionable insights. These should be measurable and aligned with your marketing strategies.
Your numbers may mean more to you and your team in this context. For instance, your follower growth might feel impressive but could be a drop in the ocean to your competitors.
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Analyze Your Audience
In a broad sense, benchmarking is comparing one’s processes or performance metrics to others to identify areas of opportunity. Regarding social media, this can mean evaluating your current followers, the frequency of your content posts, or even the speed of your response time against your competitors.
The most essential step in benchmarking is to understand your audience. Use tools like Unmetric to compare your brand’s Facebook and Instagram follower growth against industry standards. In addition, consider looking at data from similar brands targeting the same people.
To gauge the performance of marketing efforts, businesses often reference social media industry benchmarks, which provide valuable comparative metrics and insights into industry standards and trends.
Aside from understanding your audience, setting goals before starting your benchmarking analysis is essential. This will give you a clear idea of your expectations and help you make informed decisions based on hard facts. Setting a goal can also help you determine if your efforts are working or need to be refined. For example, if your competitors gain more followers on Facebook than you, it might be time to revamp your strategy.
Analyze Your Competitors
It’s important to know where you stand in the marketplace. This can help you define realistic goals and strategies for your brand. A comprehensive social media benchmarking analysis can highlight areas in your company that need improvement.
Using a social media competitor analysis tool, you can examine various metrics from your and your competitor’s social media accounts. Choose the metrics that best align with your social media goals and focus on those as you build out your competitive analysis.
For example, if you’re in the travel industry, you may want to analyze the tone of voice, visual branding, and messaging used by your competitors. In addition, you can evaluate their content marketing tactics to reach their audience, such as influencer campaigns and social media post types, such as images and carousels.
You can also conduct an industry-specific social media benchmarking analysis to compare the number of posts and engagement rate for your top competitors. This allows you to identify gaps in your content and marketing efforts so that you can optimize your performance.
Set Goals
Setting goals is crucial to bringing your social media strategy to life. Ensure you set measurable and achievable goals aligning with your business objectives.
If you’re only looking at likes, shares, or other metrics that focus on engagement, this may only show you the surface-level performance of your content. However, your social media efforts must do more than entertain your audience — they must also contribute to your organization’s or company’s overall success.
This means setting measurable and achievable goals for follower growth, post engagement, and other social media metrics. Defining these goals and clarifying them to the entire marketing team makes it easier to create content that will reach those objectives and help your company succeed. This will allow you to prove the value of your social media efforts and justify future investment in this platform. By monitoring your results over time, you can make data-driven decisions based on what is working and what needs improvement.
Measure Your Results
When top-level management wants to know how a company did last year, they aren’t only interested in the numbers but also in the performance and benchmarks of other companies. Social media is no exception, and brands that use a fine-tuned benchmarking approach to their strategy see remarkable industry growth.
Benchmarking looks at key metrics to evaluate social media performance and predict future results. This could mean comparing performance against industry standards, direct competitors, or even your historical performance.
Whether your benchmarking approach gets as granular as pitting one metric against a single competitor or as broad as comparing an entire social channel, it is essential to put those actionable insights into practice. Use them to refine your content, optimize your strategy, or make the necessary improvements to your business. This will help you get the most out of your efforts and ensure you continue seeing positive growth.
