How do you know the “right” number of interactions with your social media posts? Is 100 likes a lot or a little? Answer: it depends.
This is where social media tests come in. This industry data tracks norms or averages for certain metrics such as social media engagement and follower growth. It gives you an idea of how companies like yours work and better understands what those 100 likes really mean.
Keep reading to learn more about the social media benchmarking process. This post includes up-to-date quizzes for key industries to help you understand where your social results are stacking up right now.
A social media benchmark is an average score that serves as a standard against which other businesses in the same industry or category can be judged or judged against. The benchmark is essentially the norm for social media marketing success. Think of it as a social media performance level that all companies within a category should strive to achieve or exceed.
Social media benchmarks are important because they provide context for your social media KPIs. It’s always a good idea to keep track of your own social media metrics and their growth over time, even in isolation. But when you put this data into context with the bigger picture of the industry, you can better understand where there is real room for improvement.
You can also use benchmarks to set realistic goals. Some industries (such as entertainment) will, by their nature, have more reach than others (such as healthcare). When you know what’s “normal”for your industry, you can set reasonable milestones that will allow you to achieve real growth without burning out your social team.
Manually compiling reliable industry social media benchmarks can require a lot of very finicky and frustrating research.
Fortunately, Hootsuite Analytics has a built-in social media benchmarking tool that allows you to compare the performance of your social media accounts with the averages of brands in your industry in just a couple of clicks.
To access this new feature, go to the Analytics section of the Hootsuite dashboard. In the Comparison section on the menu on the left, click Industry, then click Choose Your Industry and choose the one that best suits you from the drop-down menu.
Now you can see how your results compare to the average performance statistics in your industry. You can set your own time frames, switch between networks – Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok – and look for benchmarks for the following metrics:
- Profile Impressions
- Profile coverage
- Followers
- Audience Growth Rate
- Engagement rate
- Video playback
- Publication frequency
- clicks
- Stock
… and more.
You’ll also find productivity resources right in the summary section:
Try it for free
And, if you need to present your results to your team, boss, or other stakeholders, you can easily download the comparison report as a PDF file.
Let’s take a look at a snapshot of some of the most important social media benchmarking data for 2023. Here we will focus on four key indicators:
- Page/Profile Impressions: The number of times content from or about your profile or page appears on someone’s screen. Note that this number is not the same as coverage. Reach shows the number of accounts that see your content. The number of impressions is usually higher because one account can view your content multiple times.
- Audience Growth Rate: This is not just a count of new followers, but a measure of how your audience is growing (or shrinking) as a percentage of your existing followers.
- Post engagement rate: the total number of engagements (likes, comments, saves, shares) divided by the total audience, expressed as a percentage.
- Posting Frequency: The average number of posts per day.
Together, these tests give you a good idea of how your social accounts compare to the competition in terms of both performance and performance.
It’s important to compare like with like, which is why we’ve provided separate social media tests for Facebook and Instagram in each category. Impressions are based on a 30 day period.
Landmarks of social networks in education
- Facebook page views: 377,000
- Facebook audience growth rate: -3.77%
- Facebook post engagement rate: 2.62%
- Facebook posting frequency: 0.51 posts per day.
- Instagram profile impressions: 355,000
- Instagram audience growth rate: 0.03%
- Instagram post engagement rate: 2.33%
- Posting frequency on Instagram: 0.41 posts per day.
Social media landmarks in entertainment and media
- Facebook page views: 1.8 million
- Facebook audience growth rate: -1.58%
- Facebook post engagement rate: 2.59%
- Facebook posting frequency: 1.76 posts per day.
- Instagram profile impressions: 1.1 million
- Instagram audience growth rate: -1.59%
- Instagram post engagement rate: 2.2%
- Posting frequency on Instagram: 0.56 posts per day.
Social Media Benchmarks in the Financial Services Industry
- Facebook page views: 129,000
- Facebook audience growth rate: 0.24%
- Facebook post engagement rate: 1.72%
- Facebook posting frequency: 0.26 posts per day.
- Instagram profile impressions: 123,000
- Instagram audience growth rate: -0.07%
- Instagram post engagement rate: 1.92%
- Posting frequency on Instagram: 0.23 posts per day.
Social media landmarks for food and drink
- Facebook page views: 260,000
- Facebook audience growth rate: 0.28%
- Facebook engagement rate per post: 1.82%
- Facebook posting frequency: 0.29 posts per day.
- Instagram profile impressions: 204,000
- Instagram audience growth rate: -0.88%
- Instagram post engagement rate: 1.54%
- Posting frequency on Instagram: 0.26 posts per day.
Real Estate Social Media Landmarks
- Facebook page views: 47,000
- Facebook audience growth rate: 0.32%
- Facebook post engagement rate: 1.82%
- Facebook posting frequency: 0.36 posts per day.
- Instagram profile impressions: 21,000
- Instagram audience growth rate: -0.06%
- Instagram Post Engagement Rate: 1,735
- Posting frequency on Instagram: 0.28 posts per day.
Social Media Benchmarks in Retail
- Facebook page views: 974,000
- Facebook audience growth rate: 0.52%
- Facebook post engagement rate: 1.37%
- Facebook posting frequency: 0.41 posts per day.
- Instagram profile impressions: 996,000
- Instagram audience growth rate: -0.37%
- Instagram post engagement rate: 1.91%
- Posting frequency on Instagram: 0.39 posts per day.
Travel/Hospitality/Leisure Social Media Benchmarks
- Facebook page views: 591,000
- Facebook audience growth rate: -0.7%
- Facebook post engagement rate: 1.86%
- Facebook posting frequency: 0.38 posts per day.
- Instagram profile impressions: 351,000
- Instagram audience growth rate: 0.33%
- Instagram post engagement rate: 1.85%
- Posting frequency on Instagram: 0.29 posts per day.
To manually compare your results against these benchmarks, find your own metrics using social media analytics and insert your findings and relevant industry benchmarks into a spreadsheet. Or, add a benchmarking column to your social media report.
To access benchmarks for other industries and platforms, and to automatically compare your accounts with the latest benchmarks, start a free trial of Hootsuite.
From there, the data can be downloaded, exported, or added to your own social media report with just a few clicks. You also get access to graphs of your comparative performance over time, so you can spot any spikes.
1. Understand how you are doing
Tracking your metrics in isolation is only useful up to a point. You can see your social media presence grow and identify peaks and valleys in your own performance.
But without a bigger picture of your industry, it’s hard to know what it all really means. Your growth may seem slow, but it is outpacing your competitors. Or maybe your engagement rate seems good enough, but competitive analysis will show that you could be aiming for a lot more.
This context is especially important when sharing results outside of your immediate team. Meeting or exceeding industry standards shows the real value of the work you and your team do. If you are struggling to meet your benchmarks and can determine why, you can use this information to justify your request for additional resources.
Benchmarks are also a useful resource to have in your back pocket when you get the inevitable request from a client or other stakeholder to just “make a viral video”.
2. Set realistic goals
In this blog, we talk a lot about the importance of SMART goals. Benchmarking is necessary to understand the A and R parts of SMART: reachability and relevance.
Knowing what others in your industry are currently up to makes it much easier to set business goals that push you to put in enough effort to reach great goals.
3. Replicate the winning strategies of your industry leaders
As we just said, you can gain a lot of insight by comparing your own results to industry benchmarks. But you can expand that knowledge by identifying leaders in their industry who are achieving benchmark-beating results.
One way to identify these industry leaders is to customize your social media listening streams using industry keywords. As you start to recognize important voices in your niche, take a look at their accounts to get an idea of their social media strategy.
The frequency of their publication is easy to determine with a simple count. You can also get an idea of their level of engagement by comparing likes (if visible) and comments to their total number of followers.
When you find an account with a particularly high engagement rate, try reverse engineering to see what might work for them and consider how you can incorporate these lessons into your own strategy.
4. Spot Opportunities Early
You may have noticed that the benchmark audience growth rate has been slightly negative for some of the industries above, especially for Instagram. If you’re specifically focused on growing your audience quickly and are in one of these industries, this could be a sign that you should be focusing your efforts on other platforms.
As always, this is just a starting point for your own testing. For example, you may find that people who have unfollowed retail leaders on Instagram are looking for new small businesses to follow. Include benchmarks in your brainstorming, but don’t let them become your only source of strategic inspiration.
Frequently Asked Questions About Social Media Benchmarks
Do you have any questions? We have the answers.
How are social media benchmarks measured?
Social media tests measure the average performance in your industry. This includes keeping track of a large number of relevant social media accounts to understand what is normal in your area.
Once you understand industry average performance, you can compare your own social performance to calculate how efficient, inefficient, or on track you are.
To benchmark Hootsuite, we collect and anonymously compile data from social media accounts connected to Hootsuite, grouped by industry and social media. Each test is based on at least 100 social accounts and no data can be attributed to any individual account.
What is a good social media reach rate?
As you can see from the industry metrics examples above, the reach that is considered “good” varies greatly by industry and social platform.
For example, profile impressions in our benchmarks above range from 1.8 million for Facebook entertainment and display pages to a minimum of 21,000 for Instagram real estate profiles.
That’s why it’s so important to compare your metrics to relevant businesses, rather than using averages of reach and engagement overall.
What are the four types of benchmarks?
Four main types of benchmarks:
- Internal: Comparing social media metrics or success across different departments in your organization.
- External: Compare your performance to other organizations in your industry.
- Performance: Analyze your own metrics and KPIs to set goals and monitor trends in your results over time.
- Practice: Analyze how your processes compare to industry best practices to find ways to improve your workflows.
In this post, we will focus on external benchmarks and performance benchmarks as these are the types of data that comes from social media benchmarking.
Internal and practical benchmarks are inward looking and require qualitative (i.e. not numerical or quantitative) data.