Businesses need to know how they stack up against their competitors, and that principle applies to their social media efforts. 

Every social engagement platform deserves care and efficient monitoring. Competitor benchmarking is a key part of this, and to do this well your brand needs to adopt a data-driven approach that goes well beyond checking competitor accounts manually. 

Understanding competitors’ social performance will help you differentiate your messaging, identify areas for growth, and ultimately lead to better results for your own channels. 

Whether you’re considering using a new social media benchmarking tool or if you’re new to social media benchmarks, you probably have a few questions. 

Let’s go through them together. 

Why are social media benchmarking solutions important?

It’s not just millennials and Gen Z who use social media. Every age group is on social media these days and we all know that businesses that fail to capitalize on social media as a marketing channel are missing out on a huge opportunity. 

Social media has revolutionized the way we communicate with one another and do business, and it's become vital for establishing close relationships with your customers. 

Your business most likely already has a presence on social and it may be generating good results for your business – but how do you know that your results are good? Without benchmarking you’re missing out on a huge dataset that could reveal you’re lagging behind the competition and what you can do to improve. Or you might find that you’re racing ahead and can get an even bigger lead by actioning the insights you get from benchmarking. 

Either way, there’s plenty of insight to be gained from comparing your results to those of your competitors to level up your social media game. 

What should you be aiming for with social media benchmarking?

Social media benchmarking is the best way to add context to your social media numbers. Here are two benchmarking approaches that can add context to your social metrics. 

1. External benchmarking

External benchmarking is all about looking at other channels to see how you compare.  

You might, for example, want to look at metrics from industry leaders or companies that you deem highly admirable (think Fortune 500 or Inc 5000). Alternatively, you could focus on smaller companies that you find particularly impressive, such as those on the Forbes Small Giants list. 

Where can you find social media metrics for these companies? Fortunately, there are numerous studies that use data from top organizations, providing a glimpse into their performance stats. Google Scholar is a great way to keep up with the latest studies, which can aid in your benchmarking efforts.  

Another approach within external benchmarking is comparing yourself to competitors within your niche. You probably already know your main competitors off the top of your head.  

Facebook Insights makes it easy to pull high-level data on other business pages. With the ‘Pages to Watch’ feature, you can see another page’s weekly engagement stats, new page likes, and other metrics at a glance. On other platforms (like X and Instagram), you can manually check your competitors’ follower counts, likes, and comments to get a read on their engagement levels. 

Pro tip: Tools like Brandwatch Benchmark make the process easier by enabling you to look at competitor numbers side by side with your own across multiple channels. You won't need to manually look up accounts on the relevant platforms, and you can understand at a glance how you're performing. 

2. Internal benchmarking

This second method is specifically focused on your own metrics such as paid promotion. If you've previously performed a social media audit, you already know which are your best-performing ad campaigns and which aren’t. Once you identify your strongest campaigns, you can then use those metrics as benchmarks going forward.

For example, suppose your audit revealed that your top-performing Facebook campaign received a 3% CTR—but your average CTR for the channel is 0.7%. In this scenario, we could set a goal to bring the average CTR (overall) closer to 3%. Or, conversely, suppose you’re very satisfied with your overall CTR, which sits at 2%. You could then set 2% as the standard CTR you wish to maintain as you scale your budgets.  

These two benchmarking techniques will help you frame your social media performance stats within a meaningful context. There’s no need to choose just one approach. Rather, you can implement them all and benefit from the different perspectives. Once you’ve established your benchmarks, you’ll have a clearer understanding of both where you stand and where you’d like to be. 

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What social media statistics should be benchmarked?

This is an important question. 

Different social media platforms and campaigns meet different goals — and you may not need to benchmark every metric under the sun. However, there are data points that are relevant to most industries, and they’re incredibly useful for social media analysts who crave benchmarks to understand their performance. 

Let’s say you’ve posted an image of a cat dressed as baby Yoda on various social media platforms. 

  • The replies, retweets, likes, comments, and shares you’ve received for that image will be called your engagement. 
  • Social media reach, on the other hand, refers to the number of users who have come across that image on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and so on. 
  • Impressions are the total number of times the image has been shown to users on different social media platforms. 

Of course, there are all kinds of metrics you might want to benchmark with, and it’ll totally depend on your goal. 

Stats such as growth rate, community size, fan engagement, and posting volume can all be benchmarked against close competitors and the industry average.  

Tools like Benchmark allow you to compare your own key metrics against those of your competitors across your social platforms to see where you stand in the industry. 

For example, in this dashboard, you can see how brands compare to each other in aggregated social media performance across Facebook, Instagram, and X.   

Share of voice is a pivotal benchmark in assessing your social media impact. This metric evaluates your brand's visibility compared to your competitors, offering valuable insights into your industry presence. By benchmarking your share of voice, you gauge not only the level of engagement your content generates but also the quantity of content published in contrast to competitors. This analysis provides a clear view of your relative market share when it comes to conversation, enabling you to dig deeper and pinpoint growth opportunities and distinguish your brand within the industry. 

Lastly, brands should consider their content mix as an important social media benchmark. It’s important that brands use a versatile approach, incorporating various content formats in their posts to see what works best against their competitors. With the help of Benchmark, you can assess the content mix of your competitors. Let’s say your best performing competitors are investing more heavily than your brand in carousels – you might be missing an opportunity to better engage with your audience.  

How can I use a social media benchmark solution to optimize a campaign?

Good question. 

Regardless of products or services, campaign optimization is important for all brands. Social media benchmarking solutions help companies know where they stand by comparing key metrics to competing companies.  

With a tool like Benchmark, you can track the campaigns of each brand via words, phrases, or hashtags. By examining the keywords utilized in your competitors' campaigns, you can uncover valuable insights. Analyzing the performance of these specific keywords allows you to assess the level of engagement, likes, and comments generated by their campaigns.

This dashboard shows Adidas's social media posts from Facebook, Instagram, and X over the past three months, filtered by the hashtag #YouGotThis and sorted by engagement. The ability to explore competitors' feeds and analyze posts with specific hashtags helps brands draw inspiration and gain insights from engagement trends. 

To take it a step further, Benchmark’s Outliers AI tool quickly spotlights your competitors' top-performing campaigns. It highlights posts with surges in likes and comments, so you can instantly see which content deserves your attention. 

Do I need a social media benchmarking solution?

In general deciding whether your social media performance is positive or not should really be based on choosing metrics that matter and establishing a data-backed baseline. 

In essence, social media benchmarking is a powerful addition to a business’s classic, quantitative methods. It helps inform new strategies based upon beginning goals and to report on performance with more context.  

Without benchmarking, you’re lacking the context you need to get the most from your marketing efforts. 

Successful marketers will have a close understanding of where trends are headed, not just in terms of faddy social media trends but also how their own data is trending. 

By maintaining a firm grasp of the data being generated from your own social media presence and your competitors’ channels, your strategies can become refined and optimized as you look for incremental improvement on your benchmarks and the benchmarks of your industry. 

Final thoughts

Ultimately you want to rise above the competition and see what your competitors are doing and learn from their successes, innovations, and mistakes. 

To improve your social strategy by understanding what’s working and what’s not, you’re going to need a benchmarking solution. 

Brandwatch Benchmark can help your team make real-time decisions by comparing, benchmarking, and analyzing your social performance.