So What? Current Social Media Benchmarks

Well, hey everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics Insights something show. The Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. We're off to a start.

Man, it's been that kind of week. Well, the three of us are together again. It's been a while since the three of us have actually been on a show together for you know scheduling and whatnot. So, you know, it's a big day. And with that, we're talking about big stuff.

We're talking about current social media benchmarks. Um, we'll be talking about what they are, uh, what are the latest trends moving into next year, and how to measure your own benchmarks. And so we were talking about uh benchmarks in our Slack group, Analytics for Marketers the other day. And it's interesting the way that people use benchmarks and not just social media benchmarks, but industry benchmarks as a whole. So it'll be interesting to see where we go with this.

So Chris, where should we start? Uh we should probably start by talking about what social media benchmarks are. Would anyone like to uh to take their their shot at what is a social media benchmark? Oh, yeah, totally. Those are stats where if you're beating them, then you're saying, yeah, this is the benchmarks, and we are number one.

But if they're numbers where you're getting crushed, you're like, dude, those are garbage, those don't mean anything, they're not relevant to our vertical. We don't need those. That's that's totally what social media benchmarking is. Um, I believe, in addition to that, what John said, it is the sort of the uh the average metric of any one given thing. So like the average engagement for B2B brands, the average, you know, follow number for you know consumer brands.

So it's basically the number in which people incorrectly measure themselves against because they're constantly comparing themselves to their peers, which they shouldn't do. You're all unique snowflakes, act as such. We are on fire today. This is it is it's critical though because it fills this gap between like when you know for sure what's going on. Before you get to that point, you at least cling to benchmarks as like, well, here's some numbers that we know somebody has, so at least we're not totally blind.

Yeah, no, it's a good starting place to sort of say, like, this is what I could and should achieve with my brand. But once you get rolling with your own strategy, those benchmarks become, you know, irrelevant because you're you and they're them, and there's a lot of other things that aren't factored into those benchmark numbers. So now that we've completely derailed whatever Chris was gonna do, Chris, take it away. Well, I I would say I would agree with that, yes, a benchmark effectively is it's a baseline. It's it's taking a whole bunch of data and essentially applying a measure of centrality, like a median or an average, and saying this is on average what happens.

And there's I I would say there's probably three different kinds of social media benchmarks in terms of of the data. Um, there is, as you mentioned, Katie, your own data, right? So you're gonna benchmark against yourself. Where where do we starting? So that we can assess, okay, have we done a better or worse job with our marketing?

There is data you can get from social media monitoring tools. And then there's big broad data from across an industry or from you know, perhaps across an entire platform, as the major uh benchmark data sources. And you mentioned something important there about uh engagement, because one of the challenges with benchmarks, particularly when it comes to um doing things like competitive analysis and stuff, is that there's not a ton of data available. There's some, but it's it can be tricky to do apples to apples depending on uh what kind of data you're working with. And this is, you know, when I start to talk about this side of it, this is where all of my clinical trial training comes into play.

I have I take such issue with data that's not apples to apples comparison. Um, you know, and that's when I think about things like benchmarks and you comparing yourself to someone else to try to reach their number, there's no possible way it's ever gonna be apples to apples because of all the different factors. Uh, you know, the unless you have the exact same situation, the exact same followers, the exact same kind of content, the exact like there's too much variance in order for me to ever feel comfortable saying it's an apples to apples comparison because it's not. It's you may still all be on the fruit tree, but you're not the same, you know, genus and species. That's yes, I would I would agree with that.

Um based on that, then we have to say we have to figure out okay, well, how do we want what kind of benchmarks do we want to use? And so if you're just looking to compare against yourself, right? Then obviously you can just go get your own social media data from any platform that you're using, or from an aggregator tool like our friends over at Agora Pulse. Uh and that is that's that's I think is probably the most common sense and easiest to use benchmark, because you can say you you have access to your own data. You can say, okay, well, what what have we got?

What have we done? And then uh can we can we uh so get a sense of of how that's working. And that's something that you need uh essentially no real uh technical capabilities to do, right? You can just say, okay, I want to see my content, I can export it in an Excel sheet and just and then just do the math uh by hand. Um let's do this.

Let's see about let's go for example. This is our Agora Pulse um interface here. And let go to screen sharing. And for for those who you know use different social media systems, obviously use use whatever you like, doesn't really matter. Um, but you can say, okay, I want to understand my performance, and I want and let's go to the global report here, and just say, okay, well, how are we doing on you know what's our top content, uh the recommendations and things like that?

Our total engagement is 34, our total uh reach 556. So do the math. Uh and on LinkedIn, we're averaging about a six percent engagement rate, give or take. So that's that's your that's our engagement rate as a brand. Now, the question we'd want to ask though is, and this is something that executives ask us, well, is that good?

Is that bad? Like, what do you think? That is a great question. Well, as the executive, I get to ask that question, not you, Chris. Um, no, I mean it's without any other data, it's hard for me to know if that's good or bad.

That just it is the number. And so that to me says, okay, I know that as of today, six percent is my engagement rate on LinkedIn for the company. What else can I do to increase that? I mean, that's how I would use that metric. This, and again, this is sort of where I personally, I'm an N of one, have a hard time saying, okay, but you know, marketing over coffee gets an engagement rate of eight percent, or Christopherspenn.com gets an engagement rate of 10%.

Like, okay, that's good to know, but unless I structure the company and the content strategy exactly as what you guys are doing with the exact same scenario of number of followers, time of day, all that sort of stuff. It doesn't matter what your engagement rate is, quite honestly. Well, you do have the blessed that it's not zeros, too. You know, there's that. Like you could look at it and just be like, okay, everything we're doing is not working at all.

Like that can totally happen. Right. And I think that that comparison to other companies is then helpful. Like, okay, how do we get up from zero? We're starting from nothing.

But then once you get some momentum, that's where looking at other benchmarks. Again, personally, I don't see that as effective. Gotcha. Okay. Well, it it might surprise you to learn.

So one of the things that we do is in partnership with Agora Pulse, we publish uh this thing called the social media barometer. And if you're not a member of the Analytics for Marketers Slack group, um, that's one of the two places where you publish the other place we publish it is in the uh social media pulse community. Uh, as of 2022 this year, the median engagement rate for LinkedIn for uh 217,000 accounts is 0.9%, so less than one percent. So now, just getting a general sense, Katie, you can see that a six percent engagement rate for the Trusted Insights LinkedIn page is more than six X better than the overall engagement rate on LinkedIn. So, with that information, now what?

Besides pat yourself on the back. Um, you know, with that, it's good to know because that then means that we're doing something right. So, in terms of our overall tactics on what we're posting on LinkedIn, my first, you know, decree as an executive would say don't change anything, like don't do anything differently, don't change the frequency. We can increase, we can test, we can see if different times a day work, but I wouldn't decrease anything that we're doing because clearly whatever we're doing now is working. So I would say, let's not do less, let's maybe do more and see if that has any kind of an impact.

And it's interesting to note that in general, um, for the for the major social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube, which is what uh we have a partnership with Agora Pulse to look at their data. There isn't a single channel that is above uh 2% engagement. Uh now, granted, this is for every brand and company and influencer that uses their platform. We're talking everybody from you know that one guy who who does like marshmallow reviews on YouTube to you know a Fortune 10 company. So it's it is everything aggregated together.

And that is one of the challenges with uh aggregate benchmarks is that it isn't it really isn't specific to your business. Well, and um, you know, I know pretty basic math, and I know that you know there it doesn't take much to drag down an average, and so there may be some you know lower performing companies in the mix for any one of these channels that is making the average go way, way down exactly. So, how should we solve that? How should we get around that? Around what specifically?

Around the fact that you've got this big swamp of generic social media stuff, and you know, how do we know maybe the the kind of benchmark that would be useful for us uh as a company? I think that's when you start to narrow down the field to who you feel are your direct competitors. So you take a smaller pool to pick from and do you know, take the average of their engagement rates if you have that data available rather than the industry as a whole, because you most companies are never going to conquer the industry as a whole, but they could say, okay, these five players are my direct competitors. Let me get ahead of wherever they are. What is their average?

Exactly. So one of the ways to do that is with uh social listening tools. So social listening tools can help you instead of it's looking at everything, which is you know unhelpful, you can thinly slice. So here, um, this is TalkWalker, again, one of the companies we partner with uh fairly frequently. I typed in Pumpkin Spice Latte because I wanted to.

Of course you did. Fine, fine, fine. I'll put in Google Analytics for Pumpkin Spice Lattes and Google Analytics for. What one are we doing for what we can do is we can take this data and just look at it a very high level, obviously. If we go into the the sort of the top-level metrics uh in the platform, it will help round up and just give us a general sense of you know, for example, which topic gets more engagement, things like that, what sort of the sentiment is around those uh topics.

You know, more people like pumpkin spice lattes and Google Analytics 4, which is not terribly surprising. Um, however, uh underneath the hood with uh software like this, you can actually export the data out and start slicing and dicing it. The advantage of going um topic-wise is that if you have something, say like a predictive calendar uh that has specific keywords, or you have a strong SEO program, you can sort of get an a snapshot assessment of where does this stuff resonate? Like what are the what kinds of trends, where what kinds of networks uh are are available? Where does stuff do best from the raw data itself?

So I've gone ahead and exported out uh this data. And let me just do a little bit of cleaning here because I want to uh oh while he's grinding away, I do want to point out on that last screen that pumpkin spice latte was more beloved than GA4, but it was also more hated than GA4. I feel like pumpkin spice latte is very polarizing. Like you get the people who love it or the people who hate it, but you don't have people who are just kind of meh about it. Big metal, yeah.

Okay. Um if we were to look in at this engagement data just for Google Analytics 4, right? We see that most of the channels, you know, Twitter gets an extremely small amount of engagement. Uh Quora, the website of Quora, the question and answer site, gets about 1.5% engagement on content there about Google Analytics 4. And then YouTube, 4.67%.

So now if I'm sitting here as a social media manager saying, where should I be putting content about Google Analytics 4? And I can put it on Twitter, right? But there really isn't a there there. You know, trying to get something placed on TV or the newspaper, eh? Probably also not great.

But based on this, I'd say, yeah, you know what? I think I think YouTube is the place to be publishing content like that. Sort of doing the, you know, the demo, here's what it is. Here's a short clip of this one feature, that kind of a thing. Exactly.

And you could dig into the verbatims to figure out exactly what was going on underneath the hood, so that you can say, yeah, we we definitely need to to do tutorials or we definitely need to answer people's questions, whatever the the sort of the top content is. Now, if we switch things up, uh let's go to uh pumpkin spice lattes here. Okay, and we'll zoom in here for pumpkin spice lattes. We have Twitter with again a very small sliver of engagement, Quora without the same general amount, YouTube without six percent, and TikTok with you know 11.2% uh engagement. So if we're thinking about engagement and benchmarking engagement for uh pumpkin spice latte related content, seems pretty clear to me that we've got to be doing stuff with with TikTok.

We've got to figure out how to how to get content on there. And we saw earlier this week, it was in yesterday's Trust Insights newsletter, even for boring, boring content like you know, B2B marketing or e-commerce or analytics, TikTok was still averaging on a nine percent engagement rate for content on on that particular topic. And so there's you know, from a uh a benchmarking type perspective, there's a there there that we might have to change our social media strategy for. It's interesting because we started in talking about sort of the broad strokes of you know, benchmarks, but now you're digging into the topic level benchmarks per social media platform. And I wonder, you know, how realistic that is for you know a company that isn't us who you know, they write about you know 20 different topics, you know, how easy it is it for them to do this kind of analysis without something like R.

Like is that possible? Can they do it all within TalkWalker? Um I don't know the answer to that question. Um I know that you can get the broad themes and dig into the broad themes about uh the topic and see sort of how that topic looks. Uh let's take a look here.

But does it tell you which channel is the most popular for that topic? Let's see. Because I feel like at a very high level, that might be you know uh a starting place if you are starting with your content and social media strategy to say, all right, I have been tasked with writing as much as I can about Google Analytics 4 and bringing in awareness and engagement into my website. Where the heck does this content go? Because you can't necessarily like you could just sort of like post it everywhere and hope for the best, but chances are you don't have that kind of you know time and resources to do that.

So if you wanted to sort of prioritize where you were going, that would be helpful. Yeah, I I want to say I believe you can, uh, but I believe you have to change it from a general project to a monitored analytics project. And yes, so you can, and then you choose media types, and you can say, okay, show me the media types for pumpkin spice lattes. And it probably has not populated yet because they literally just created uh the project, but there is a way to slice and dice that. If you don't have data processing capabilities on the back end, you still can do this.

So I think that that's an incredibly helpful way to be thinking about it. Rather than looking at, you know, what are my competitors doing? This type of analytics anal analysis, oh my goodness, this type of analysis seems more useful in terms of your own planning rather than saying, oh, well, Chris and his company over there, this is what they're doing. Well, who cares what they're doing? This is the type of data that you should be looking at to inform your plan.

Exactly. I figured out what was wrong. Uh, I have to go talk to our friends at Talk Walker. I have exceeded our monthly data limit. Oh, Chris.

Shocker. Uh exactly. Now, the other thing you can do for again for trends is uh and understanding social media benchmarks, you can also thinly slice uh very specific kinds of data. So, for example, uh right now, uh Dream Force, the the massive Salesforce conference is occurring. So you could take a look at uh looking at engagement, you know, at at an event and seeing if if one crowd is particularly engaged, more engaged than another.

You could compare it with maybe content marketing world or with inbound, and that information might even tell you uh or hint at maybe one of these events has a more engaged audience, and therefore, if you're trying to market to that crowd, that audience, that might be uh useful insight if you were to compare, say maybe Burning Man with Coachella. You know, if you're a consumer brand, you might want to say, yeah, you know, this has the more engaged audience. We might be able to get more uh more attention to us based on the benchmark of engagement within these topics. Okay, so where do you go from here uh the first thing that we have to tackle is you have to figure out what kind of benchmark you want are you looking for just your own like how are we doing right setting up baseline are you looking for a narrow competitive or topic based benchmark uh which case you should probably use a social listening tool of some kind or are you looking for big you know broad general performance if you want the your own data then yeah as we said export it straight out of something like Agora Pulse uh or the system of your choice then uh if you want the competitive stuff from social listening tools like talkwalker and then for the big stuff uh look for industry level publications um for example the one we publish with Agora Pulse is a good example uh of a very broad very very broad uh slice and then the second thing you have to do is with that data you have to establish a measure of centrality so what is what is the middle what is the baseline in the in in that social media benchmark going to be is it an average because as you know averages can get really really really skewed by you know one or two major overperformers or one or two major overperformers you know if um if Jeff Bezos join this call right now the average income on this call would skyrocket to like up a billion dollars and yet none of us here are are billionaires yet um a median would say okay you know no matter you know if if he's you know Jeff is here or not the median pretty much stays you know, pretty consistent. Generally speaking, for social media data of any kind, median your median is the best number to choose.

There's there's averages just a bad idea. I'm curious, um, you know, because you have both had your own individual, you know, online assets, you know, prior to just insights, you know. So, Chris, do you ever look at you know competitive benchmarks for your own stuff? And John, same question to you for marketing over coffee. Like, do you care?

And if you're like, why or why not? And it's it's a legitimate question. Yeah, usually not. I mean, because it's again, it falls into that thing of you end up just either you know proving you're awesome or that you're a loser, you know, you kind of get stuck between those two points. There's no middle ground.

Um it is interesting to to look at it and dig in and kind of see what's the distribution. Like, it's really interesting to see, like, okay, so this person over here is very similar to what we're doing. Like, which channels are they crushing it in, you know, and should I be in some other channel? Um, and to see what kinds of content they're publishing that's working, trying to get a better feel for like, okay, this kind of stuff seems to run. So to give you uh, you know, help with your content calendaring, that can help a lot.

In my occasionally more petty moments, I will look at uh certain individuals to see like, okay, is this person way don't think of it very highly? How are they doing with their stuff? But in general, uh, no. Generally, I don't even benchmark my own stuff personally, because personally, at least for social media benchmarks, I've written off social media. I think social media just generally I've I've kind of said, eh, whatever.

I do pay attention to uh the the analytics, the data I get in Google Analytics itself. So yeah, which channels are driving traffic, and I think that's a useful benchmark uh to say, like, okay, in in GA4, which of these social channels does anything. But I found that private social media communities like the analytics for market or Slack group do a way better job at at driving traffic and converting than say Facebook, which I I try to avoid like a like a plague. Um for guiding performance, I don't look at social media benchmarks very much. Uh I look at search data because to me, what somebody types into a search engine behaviorally tends to precede what someone is going to talk about, right?

Uh, because you're going to search for it first to learn about it. And those queries I find much more informative to see, you know, the what's what the book title is called. Everybody lies. You know, what people type into search engines, they would never ask another human being. That data, I think, even though we know it's partially obscured, is still super informative for understanding where the audience's head is at, and then being able to create content around it.

When we started Trust Insights, I think we definitely did sort of uh so that we could put together our business plan, we needed to look at those benchmarks of you know who we thought were going to be our peers. Um, so that we at least had a sense of like in year one, this is you know, these are the goals that we're gonna try to meet, these are the numbers that we're gonna try to reach, and the companies that we're going to try to emulate. And you know, as the years have gone on, those companies have changed, those metrics have changed, our tactics have changed, the way in which we approach uh has changed a lot. And so, you know, it is sort of that caution of sure, benchmarks looking at your competitive benchmarks is helpful in certain contexts, it's not always helpful. Um, you know, because again, you know, the content strategy that you have may be different from the content strategy that your competitor has.

Maybe they have the resources to churn out, you know, a hundred blog posts a week, and you only have the resources to churn out 10. You know, it's not then a fair comparison to say that their search is better than yours. Like obviously it is, they have volume working in their favor. And so those are the other data points that need to be factored in when you're thinking about looking at benchmarks outside of your own organization. Yeah.

The one thing I will say that the system wide benchmark does help with is understanding when there has been a system change, when something has has changed at the platform level. So if we look at this chart here, that red line that represents Facebook, and you can see the engagement on Facebook for most brands for the first half of 2022 was essentially almost zero. It's really, really low. And then right around uh end of May, uh beginning of June, you see that it creeps up. Now it's still not a lot, we're still talking about one half of one percent, but there was a system-wide change in terms of how Facebook engagement was working for for companies again on the Agora Pulse platform.

We're talking still hundreds of thousands of accounts, and we see uh at the sort of the end of July, mid to end of July, we see Instagram performance beginning to tick back up as well. This it this tells us that something happened in those systems themselves. Now I have it a completely unfounded theory that is pure speculation, and that is that Meta has been losing so many people to other platforms that they're doing whatever they can, including trying to get businesses to just stick around. So letting the algorithm essentially give favor back to businesses to say, like don't leave us for TikTok yet, please. But I can't prove that from this data.

But I I can prove that something materially did change on those platforms this year. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think we're, I mean, we were talking about that yesterday in a different context in terms of, you know, overall growth and numbers going up, the rate in which people are leaving certain things or unsubscribing versus you know new people coming on board, like it's kind of, you know, it's chasing its tail. We don't know which one is moving faster.

Exactly. But what we what you can again, that comes that's where your own baselines, your own benchmarks really come in handy when you can look at your own performance and say, well, yeah, how is our audience doing? Something as simple as just looking at new versus returning users in your Google Analytics from social media will let you know, am I retaining a loyal audience? Or am I just churning people? Is it a revolving door?

Somebody comes in from social media, looks around, doesn't like what they see, and and just bells out. Um that's that can be a problem. Um now I want to share something, Chris. So I'm gonna share my screen. Go for it.

See if I can do this without breaking everything. All right, share that. All right, so if you are wanting to see how you stack up against your competitors, and yes, this is a little bit of a sales pitch. Uh we, Trust Insights have developed uh basically, you know, math equations that will help understand across the major uh marketing tactics, uh, search, social, earn, paid, and owned where you stack up against your competitors. And so we would take you compared to you know your top three to five you know peers and say, in terms of search, you're leading, keep doing what you're doing, or you're trailing behind the other three companies that you see yourself stacked up against, and so on and so forth.

So it is good as a gut check to just sort of see where you stand, but it doesn't necessarily, I personally don't think it should inform your entire strategy. I think it should become just a data point for you to reference to say, you know, did I do better or worse than you know the person sitting next to me? I did a little bit better, okay, great. I'll keep doing what I'm doing. Ultimately, your business goals should be what are makes sense for your business, but it does there is value in just looking around to see what your nearest you know competitors are doing.

And this is one of those ways that you can do that in a you know pretty straightforward manner. Exactly. No, I think that's that's terrific. Um, going back to what we were talking about earlier as well, too. If you are familiar with Google Analytics 4, right, and um and Google Data Studio, uh, one of the things you can do just to gauge social media, you set a social media uh benchmark is put together a super simple chart of new users versus returning users, and just say from a uh channel grouping, assuming you've got you set up your channel groupings correctly, uh, I want to look at organic social media and say, okay, over time, what is my new versus returning uh uh users look like for for social media?

You will you should be able to make a determination, like, yeah, you know, social media is either driving a loyal audience or it's not. In this case, when we look at um this particular uh GA4 account, social media is not. It's not doing a great job of of bringing in that loyal audience, right? So our baseline, our benchmark for social media is eh kind of not great. Uh it's it's it's not uh it's not a channel that's working well for uh for you know this particular account.

I think this is my account. But that I think when we talk about setting a social media benchmark is a very useful way of looking at it, saying what traffic are we getting and what quality traffic is it? Are we getting people to keep coming back? Are they paying attention to us, or is it just a constant stream of looky loose, which it kind of is? And you know, again, shameless plug.

If you haven't set up Google Analytics for follow us. Yeah, no, and that's the thing is there are ways in which you can look at your own data, and a lot of that is you know, things that we can help with. And you know, one of the purposes of us doing this live stream in general is to help show like here's what's possible, but then also by the way, we can help you do the thing. So, yes, the show is always kind of a shameless plug. Um, you know, that makes John happy.

It makes his job easier. Um so it it to sort of summarize, so we you know, we've gone through what the social media benchmarks are, you know, where you get the data, what data is available, how do you get the data, um, the trends that we see going into 2023, certainly at a aggregate level and at a topic level. If you want eyeballs and your audiences there, you probably should be doing stuff with TikTok. I mean, uh whether or not that's your thing, you don't really get a say in because the audience dictates everything. And then in terms of of getting started, export your data from wherever it lives, choose that measure of centrality, establish your baseline, and then do your best to beat your baseline, particularly if it's your own data that you're trying to best figure out what did work, what didn't work, your top five or ten or twenty posts on any given platform.

Figure out how do you how do you improve on that. If you want a copy of this, we're gonna put it in the analytics for marketers slack group. We'll just put uh drop the PDF in there so make sure that you you stop on by. Yeah, I think that makes sense. And you know, if you want help understanding your own benchmark data, then definitely give John a call.

He would be happy to talk to you day or night, 24-7. His phone is never off. Right here. Click today. Make sure you hit that like button and mash subscribe.

See, I thought you were gonna go with the whole Ghostbusters, you know, no problem is too big, no fee is too big. No fee is too big. I think that kind of wraps it up for today, guys. Uh I think it does. Uh, thanks for tuning in.

We'll catch you next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast. At our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter.

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