Context is equally as important as numbers when evaluating social media success. How would you know if 100 likes is a good or bad number if you didn’t know the context?
Because it allows you to put your own numbers in perspective, benchmarking is an essential tool. If you want to see the big picture, you need to be able to compare your numbers to something meaningful. Also, in this article, you will learn how to establish social media standards for your online shop.
Exactly what is social media benchmarking, and why is it important?
In order to benchmark your social media efforts, you should compare your metrics and procedures to those of your competitors. There are a variety of indicators that are analysed. As an added bonus, it benchmarks your metrics against the metrics of your rivals, giving you a complete picture of your business’s success.
Comparisons to others in your industry can be made much simpler with the help of social media benchmarks. Furthermore, you gain from this in a variety of ways:
To start, you can learn more about the tactics used by your rivals. Can you explain what it is that they have changed? Just how can you put those plans into action to boost your efficiency and effectiveness?
Find out how well received the content you’ve already created is by your target demographic. This gives you insight into what works well and what could be better so you can refine future efforts.
You can use it to keep up with the most recent developments in your field.
You can learn to plan your finances more effectively. Are you throwing money away on things that don’t matter much? Do you have the ability to put more money where it’s needed?
Introducing Social Media Benchmarking
Having established why social media benchmarks are so crucial, let’s dive into the process of developing them. In order to establish some sort of norms for your social media shop, you should consider the following:
You should evaluate your requirements and objectives
Identifying your “why” for using social media and the need for benchmarking is the first step. Do you seek to expand your social media clientele? To increase sales and possibly even repeat business. Make sure you have a clear idea of your needs and goals before beginning the benchmarking process.
This is essential in order to know what you’re measuring and how to proceed with your benchmarking. One possible objective is to improve one’s social media content strategy. In this case, you should evaluate the success of your current content by contrasting it to that of similar pages.
You can analyse your social media results in great detail with the help of Keyhole’s Social Media Reporting tool. Top-performing content is tracked, too, so you can see what kinds of things your followers enjoy the most. Therefore, this social media objective makes sense when using these insights and metrics.
Select the Analyzed Platforms
It is important to identify the most important platforms to benchmark in order to concentrate your efforts. If you want to reach your audience, you should concentrate your efforts where they spend the most time online. One strategy for growth, however, is to examine the areas of weakness on which your business currently relies.
Furthermore, investigate the channels where your rivals are finding the most success. Putting it all together like this will give you a much better idea of their strong points and areas for development. In particular, you should prioritise those channels that are currently, or have the potential to be, beneficial to your company.
Specify the Key Performance Indicators You Plan to Track
The next step is to settle on a set of metrics that will serve as useful yardsticks. You can compare and contrast on a wide range of metrics. For the time being, though, zero in on the metrics that truly matter for your current social media objective. Metrics like the rate of follower expansion, the regularity of posting, the level of interaction with individual posts, and so on could be used as benchmarks in a competitive analysis.
Professionals care most about the engagement rate per post, as reported by a survey conducted by SocialInsider. Commonly tracked indicators include the number of likes and comments a post receives, as well as its total reach and rate of growth in followers.
Metrics such as average engagement, post type distribution, posting frequency, and more could be monitored in addition to the aforementioned.
Pick the right benchmarking methods
You’ll need specialised software to get reliable results when benchmarking your social media performance. Social media analytics tools abound, and they can all help with comparisons. You should prioritise options that provide access to both historical data and information about the market and its competitors. On top of that, you must guarantee that it will supply reliable results (try double-checking with native analytics data, if need be.)
Keyhole is a great choice because it provides both current and past data on your efficiency. Top posts, sentiment, social media post types, and more can all be measured with this tool. On top of that, you can evaluate your results in relation to those of the competition.
The fifth step is to use the information to draw conclusions and take action.
Use the information gathered from benchmarking to inform strategic decisions. Consider the following scenario: you’ve learned that your rivals are enjoying substantial levels of video engagement. Your takeaway here could be something like, “Make at least four or five videos for social media every single month.”
Acquiring More Followers on Social Media
With this foundational knowledge in place, you can now move forward with social media benchmarking. Get started tracking KPIs to find out where you stand and how you can improve your social media marketing efforts. Accurate benchmarking is the first step, whether your plan of action is to increase user-generated content production or to completely rethink your approach.