Social Media Benchmarking in 5 Steps – This is How You Perform Against Your Competitors

How do you perform among others in your industry? Benchmarking helps you find out how your social media profiles perform in comparison to your competitors. Comparing your profiles with your industry helps you to improve your performance. If you know what works for competitors, you can use it for your own profiles to increase reach and engagement.

In this article you will learn everything you need to know about benchmarking and how to successfully perform a benchmarking analysis in 5 steps.

What is Benchmarking?

Benchmarks are comparative values to determine your performance in comparison to your direct competitors and relevant industry standards. 

For example, Amazon Prime’s Instagram profile has a post interaction of 1.4%. Is that good or bad? It depends on how other streaming providers perform on Instagram. If the other companies have an average post interaction of 2.0%, Amazon Prime falls below this benchmark and has therefore performed poorly. If the benchmark is 1.0% post interaction, Amazon Prime lies above the industry average.

Benchmarking allows you to compare your social media performance to the rest of the industry.

How to Conduct Social Media Benchmarks

We show you 5 steps to benchmark your social media performance and how Fanpage Karma can help you.

1. Identify your Competitors

Focus on your industry and identify relevant companies. Think about whether you want to compare yourself nationally or globally with competitors. The market leader as well as your direct competitors are suitable for comparison. This will give you a basic idea of how large your industry is and how many competitors you are dealing with. Make a list of the most important competitors and also your own company. 

Amazon Prime’s main competitors on the German market are Apple TV, Netflix, Disney + and Sky. The graph shows the number of Instagram followers of each company’s profile. Apple TV ranks first, Amazon Prime third and Sky is the profile with the fewest followers.

A social media dashboard allows you to clearly display all profiles in one spreadsheet. The table shows you the different social media profiles of each company as well as important KPIs. Make sure to add all important competitors and your own profiles. It is useful to look at different networks separately to obtain accurate benchmarks.

2. Determine relevant Benchmarks 

Define which KPIs are important for your social media strategy. Which metrics you want to analyze depends on your goals. Depending on the social network, key figures can differ from one another. In this case, make sure you know which values will be relevant for your analysis. 

Use the previously created dashboard to determine concrete benchmarks for the respective networks. You will need to take the average of the individual key figures of all profiles (marked in blue) to get to the actual benchmarks. The averages displayed in the bottom part of the table (marked red) represent the benchmarks of the streaming industry on Instagram. 

Above table shows a 1.2% post interaction benchmark for the streaming industry. Amazon Prime ranks slightly above the benchmark with 1.4 %. Amazon Prime performs better than average in post interaction among the industry.

3. Rank Yourself 

Once you determined the important benchmarks of your industry, you should compare yourself to your industry. Create a benchmarking report that clearly shows the performance comparison using different charts. Visualizing your results will help you to get a better overview of the performance of your profiles and the industry. Create charts with each KPI and get a clear picture of your branch.

Here you see a report on the performance of streaming providers and get a first impression what your evaluation can look like. The bar chart in the upper right corner shows that Apple TV has the most followers on Instagram. If you look at the growth chart in the lower left, you can see that profiles from Apple TV and Netflix are growing the fastest by far.   

Using a report will help you to illustrate relevant key figures for your benchmarking analysis and share them with your team. Download the report and share it with your team to visually underline your strategy.

4. Monitor your Industry

You should monitor the benchmarks of your industry on a regular basis once you have identified them. Tracking will keep you up to date on the latest trends in your industry. This will help you to react faster to social media trends and adapt or reschedule measures more quickly. 

5. Improve your Performance 

Comparing yourself with your industry has shown you how you currently perform among your industry competitors. The collected data will show you where to start improving your performance and how to turn raw facts into actionable insights. These results will help you to reflect measures or change your strategy to improve your social media performance. If you discover that your average post-interaction levels below the industry average, your content will be less successful in reaching your audience. Stay updated on current trends and topics and work on your content strategy. 

The image shows streaming service providers and industry benchmarks (marked red). Having a closer look at the performance of Amazon Prime’s Instagram profile (marked in blue), you will notice that it performs above average compared to most benchmarks. Especially with a number of 54 posts and an engagement of 2.7%, the profile performs above average. Yet it is interesting that the absolute growth of 6.6 thousand lies significantly below the benchmark of 20 thousand. With only 264 thousand followers they also miss the benchmark of 883 thousand followers by far. Like this, you can analyze the performance of different metrics. Step by step you will find out strengths and weaknesses of your social media presence. 

Conclusion

Social media benchmarking shows you how you rank in your industry and helps you assess your performance. The industry comparison enables you to set realistic goals and adapt your strategy to your target audience. Once you have ranked your company, you can more easily identify weaknesses and develop measures that will reach your target group effectively. Keeping an eye on your industry, you will always learn about current trends and topics early on. Benchmarking gives you the information you need to improve your profiles and increase reach and clicks.