How’s your social media game? If you’ve been haphazardly posting, hoping your content is reaching and resonating with your target audience, it’s time to take a more organized, focused approach. In order to keep up with competitors, you need to be aware of your social metrics and track your progress over time. Let’s take a look at 3 social media benchmarks that can help you gauge your social media effectiveness.
Engagement
Engagement is a word we use a lot around here because it’s a critical benchmark to measure your success on social media. Engagement measures whether or not people are interacting with your content. When you look at engagement, you look at metrics such as:
- Likes
- Saves
- Comments
- Shares/Re-shares
- Subscribing
- Following
- Buying/clicking article links
- Private messages/direct messages
Metrics carry different values from one social media platform to another. Their value can also increase or decrease over time. For example, likes were the most sought-after metric on Instagram, until recently, when Instagram gave saves the coveted top slot. So as you look at engagement benchmarks, don’t just assume you know what you should be doing. Take time to understand what the most valuable engagement is for each social platform and go from there.
Frequency & regularity
How often and how regularly you post to your social media accounts matters. Gone are the days of hitting follow and seeing every single post from that account in your feed. Algorithms now “sort” and “prioritize” posts based on how active the account is. Regularity matters too. For example, if you post every single day for a week and then the following week you don’t post at all, you may see a decline in engagement because your followers aren’t seeing your posts in their feeds.
Frequency is an important benchmark to track, especially in relation to your competitors. If you’re not posting on a regular basis because you forget to or you’re running out of content ideas, you’re not alone. Try creating posts in batches whenever your creative juices are flowing and schedule them weeks (or months!) in advance. The more you can automate things the better. As for the content itself, ask your followers what they would like to see or consider outsourcing social media management to a professional.
Influencers
When you think of influencers, you probably picture a celebrity endorsing a product. But influencers are growing to include prominent social media users with a large following and whose accounts fit in a particular niche such as beauty products, interior design, gaming, etc.
Brands sometimes harness the power of influencers to gain exposure and pull in new clientele. Giving an influencer a free product in exchange for an endorsement or review may sound like something only big, established brands do. But small businesses are starting to realize how valuable influencers can be, especially in the social media arena. The influencer trend is alive and well, so this is definitely a benchmark to keep an eye on.