Have you ever heard the term social media benchmarks? Just as every industry and field has some measures to assess the progress against the targets, social media also has some criteria. These benchmarks evaluate the process and progress against the predefined industry standards. You might be thinking about why social media benchmarking is essential. So, the answer is that it gives you a context to analyze your numbers and decide whether they are good enough or not.
Importance of Social Media Benchmarking
Social media benchmarks go through performance matrices comprised of multiple factors such as followers’ growth rate, engagement, number of posts, etc. The performance matrices help track your progress against competitors, giving you a 360-degree view of your performance. Here are some benefits of social media benchmarking that will improve your understanding.
- Its first and foremost benefit is that it keeps updating you with your competitors’ strategies and gives you insights to improve your strategy.
- By benchmarking, you can assess the effectiveness of your current strategy.
- Social media benchmarks help you remain updated with the latest unique trends that dominate social media platforms.
- You can plan your budget to invest in critical areas and remove unnecessary spaces.
The advantages of benchmarking are not limited to the ones described above, as it helps you reach a broader audience.
Followers’ Engagement
It is essential to track because it helps you analyze whether your audience is interactive. This interaction doesn’t mean communicating with you regularly; instead, this term refers to the participation of your audience. Through this benchmark, you keep track of your audience activity, including likes, shares, and comments.
You must check out how often your audience likes, shares, or comments on your post when you upload it. Does your uploaded video get your audience’s views or not? To make your online marketing campaigns successful and widely recognized, some key performance indicators help you assess your performance. Followers’ engagement can be evaluated by following social media benchmarks.
- Post frequency
This refers to the amount of content you post daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. The number of posts per day or week is the standard for measuring post frequency. It gives you a clear view of your social media marketing effectiveness.
If there is a decrease in audience engagement with low post frequency, you need to improve your marketing strategy. On the contrary, if there is an increase or no reduction in audience engagement with low post frequency, keep going with the current marketing strategy.
This information is essential in formulating the right marketing strategy for your business. However, the crucial step in developing a social media marketing strategy is to know your audience first and plan accordingly.
If your audience is a daily user or participant, you must post regularly. On the other hand, if your audience is a frequent user, you can post weekly. Therefore, to make your social media marketing successful, know your audience and their participation style. Increasing engagement is the most useful social media benchmark.
- Trending and hashtags
This social media benchmark doesn’t apply to every social media platform, but it is effective for Twitter and Instagram. The hashtag refers to using the symbol “#” before a word or sentence, making it searchable for the audience. Hashtags require greater attention because they keep updating regularly. To become a part of this trend, you must keep updated on the latest trending hashtags on social media.
Efficient use of hashtags can help generate traffic to your social media channel, thus resulting in the success of your marketing strategy. It would be best to be realistic and specific while using a hashtag; otherwise, it will not result in audience engagement.
Discover a brand slogan that you can transform into a hashtag. Communicate your brand message simply and straightforwardly to your target audience. Among the other social media benchmarks, trending and hashtags are specific to Instagram and Twitter.
- Engagement rate
This key factor represents the internet environment and measures the participation of your target audience. You can find this through likes, shares, and comments on your single post. On Twitter, likes and shares can be considered engagement rates. Comments and shares are forms of engagement on Facebook. On the contrary, watch time likes and subscribers are supposed to measure the engagement rate.
For a website, time spent on a page, scrolling, and immediate action can be considered factors to measure the engagement rate. Different social media platforms use different matrices to measure performance.
Wrap Up
You can choose a performance metric based on your social media platform and the type of business. These social media benchmarks help you make your marketing strategies widely recognized and accepted by your audience.
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