- \n
- Audience<\/li>\n
- Posting frequency<\/li>\n
- Engagement rate<\/li>\n
- Engagement total<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
You can also benchmark your content and strategy against your competitors, which we\u2019ll explain more about below. Let\u2019s go over how each of these metrics can be used as benchmarks when comparing your social performance to the competition.<\/p>\n
Audience<\/h3>\n
Follower count has always been an important social metric to keep an eye on. But what\u2019s more indicative of your success on any platform is your audience growth over time, especially when compared to your competitors\u2019 growth rate. If you\u2019ve been able to consistently grow your follower count, then you\u2019re clearly doing something right. But if your audience size has stayed the same \u2014 or worse, decreased \u2014 then your content may not be resonating and could use an evaluation.<\/p>\n
In Rival IQ, you can track your audience\u2019s net change and compare it to your competitors\u2019 audience size to see how your brand stacks up. Getting a visual of audience growth can really put it into perspective and give you a better understanding of how your follower count has grown (or stayed the same) and whether or not it aligns with similar brands in your industry.<\/p>\n
![\"One](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-bencmarks-follower-change-700x272.png\")
<\/p>\nFor example, if you see that your competitors are growing their audiences at a much faster rate than you, you could look into what they\u2019re doing differently to gain so many followers (hint: the answer is probably running a giveaway).\u00a0 You can also create a custom dashboard to track audience growth over time and get more insight into the ebbs and flows across a set period of time, whether that\u2019s yearly, quarterly, or monthly.<\/p>\n
Posting frequency<\/h3>\n
These days, there isn\u2019t one magic number to aim for when it comes to how often you should be posting. Our latest report found that posting frequency has generally declined<\/a>, but it varies by channel and industry. For example, most brands only post on TikTok once or twice a week but post on Instagram nearly five times per week.<\/p>\n
To get a better idea of how often to post on each channel, it\u2019s helpful to use posting frequency as a competitive benchmark. Take a look at how often your competitors post to each channel and how that frequency correlates to other metrics such as engagement rates or follower growth.<\/p>\n
![\"Rival](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-posting-frequency-700x272.png\")
<\/p>\nIn the example above, we can see that the health food brand Real Good Foods<\/a> posts significantly more across all channels than similar brands in its industry. If Real Good Foods is your competitor, you could use this information to analyze whether the brand\u2019s posting frequency has made a positive impact on its audience size or engagement rates and then decide if that\u2019s something you want to incorporate into your social strategy.<\/p>\n
Engagement rate<\/h3>\n
Engagement rate is a key competitive benchmark to use when measuring your success on a platform. Engagement rate tells you whether your content is resonating with your audience. An engaged audience can translate into a number of business benefits such as increased brand awareness, customer loyalty, website traffic, and even sales if your content is compelling enough. So it\u2019s safe to say social media marketers are always looking for ways to improve engagement rates across channels.<\/p>\n
Monitoring your own engagement rate is a good first step, but understanding how your engagement rate compares to your competitors can tell you a lot more. When you can see how your rate stacks up within the industry, you have a clearer picture of whether you\u2019re on the right track or missing the mark.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-engagement-rate-700x339.png\")
<\/p>\nEngagement total<\/h3>\n
In addition to engagement rate, measuring the total number of engagements you and your competition are getting can tell you a lot. At Rival IQ, we define engagement<\/a> as measurable interaction on organic and paid social media posts. These interactions include likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares, and reactions and comprise the engagement total.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-engagement-total-700x272.png\")
<\/p>\nWhen digging into engagement totals, it\u2019s important to take a look specifically at the types of engagements you and your competitors are receiving.<\/p>\n
For example, let\u2019s say you generate a decent amount of likes on your Instagram posts but your competitors tend to get more comments and shares. This could indicate that while your followers may be seeing your posts, those posts may not resonate with them as much as your competitors\u2019 posts do.<\/p>\n
Strategy benchmarks<\/h3>\n
Once you have an idea of where you stand among the competition when it comes to audience size and engagement rates, it\u2019s a good idea to dig a little deeper into what exactly they\u2019re doing differently from you.<\/p>\n
You can measure your overall social strategy against the competition by analyzing content metrics. These types of metrics can include popular topics, engaging hashtags, and top-performing posts. How exactly do these help with benchmarking? Let\u2019s take a look at the example below which features popular topics and hashtags used by health foods brands.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-popular-hashtags-markup-700x370.png\")
<\/p>\nYou can see that one of the most engaging hashtags used by this landscape of brands is #foodie, with an engagement rate by follower of 4.40%. However, out of the 15 brands being analyzed in this landscape, only about half are using this hashtag in their posts. If you happened to be one of the brands that haven\u2019t used this hashtag before, then this insight would tell you that it\u2019s worth sneaking #foodie into your captions every once in a while in an effort to improve engagement. Had you not benchmarked your brand\u2019s content against the competition, you may have missed out on a simple yet effective change you could make to improve your content.<\/p>\n\n
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\n \n Ready to perform a competitive analysis? Start your free Rival IQ trial. <\/p>Get my free trial <\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Creating a competitive landscape using Rival IQ<\/h3>\n
Once you\u2019re ready to use competitive benchmarks to improve your social performance, you can use Rival IQ to set up a landscape. A landscape is simply a collection of companies you analyze together in one place.<\/p>\n
To create a landscape, start by identifying your competitors. These are the brands you want to compare your social performance with. If you\u2019re new to an industry or just not sure who your competitors are, Google your brand name to see which other brands come up. You can also search your name on a social platform and typically the platform will suggest similar brands to check out.<\/p>\n
Once you have a set of competitors that you want to compare your own brand to, you can create a landscape in Rival IQ.<\/p>\n
Start by choosing a name for your landscape. To keep with the food theme, we\u2019ll create one for health food brands.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-new-landscape-700x196.png\")
<\/p>\nNext, add your competitors to the landscape. Rival IQ gathers the brand\u2019s public social media accounts from its website. If you start to type in a brand\u2019s name, its website URL should pop up and then you can add it to your landscape.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-adding-companies-700x272.png\")
<\/p>\nOnce you\u2019ve added all of the companies you want to compare your brand to, create your landscape to start analyzing.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-landscape-companies-700x345.png\")
<\/p>\nYou\u2019ll see all of the companies in your landscape in one place so you can monitor everything from when they change their bio to notable posts to popular topics. You can even set up alerts that notify you of these changes so you can stay on top of your social game without combing through different accounts all day long.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-alert-feed-700x294.png\")
<\/p>\n4 Examples of Using Competitive Benchmarks for Social<\/h2>\n
Now that we know how competitive benchmarks can impact your social performance, let\u2019s take a look at competitive benchmarking in action on each channel. We\u2019ll use the health food brand good culture<\/a> as our example.<\/p>\n
Facebook<\/h3>\n
On Facebook, good culture\u2019s most common post type is a photo. While photos get a decent amount of engagement on the platform, links are *slightly* more engaging for brands in this landscape. However, this analysis also tells us that health food brands on Facebook<\/a>, good culture included, aren\u2019t posting nearly as many links as they are photos.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-post-types-700x232.png\")
<\/p>\nWhat does this all mean in terms of benchmarking? If good culture and similar health food brands want to improve engagement on Facebook, then it would be worth it to post a mix of photos and links to stand out among the competition.<\/p>\n
Instagram<\/h3>\n
Now let\u2019s analyze good culture\u2019s Instagram performance compared to competitive brands. When it comes to audience size, good culture is towards the bottom of the pack. However, the brand has seen decent improvements when it comes to growth rate during this reporting period.<\/p>\n
![\"Two](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-good-culture-followers-markup-700x273.png\")
<\/p>\nIf good culture wanted to work on increasing its audience size, there are a couple of things they could evaluate. First, what did they do during this reporting period that could have resulted in an increase in followers? Second, what did their competition do to grow their audiences?<\/p>\n
For starters, if we take a look at good culture\u2019s most engaging posts for this reporting period, we can see that three out of four of them were giveaways. Giveaways are a tried and true method for getting in front of a new audience and gaining more followers, so it makes sense that these contests were a key part of good culture\u2019s growth strategy.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-good-culture-top-posts-700x219.png\")
<\/p>\nNext, let\u2019s take a look at what good culture\u2019s competitors did to boost their follower count to identify any similarities or differences. Two of the brands that saw the greatest increase in audience size were Real Good Foods<\/a> and Jeni\u2019s Ice Cream<\/a>. If we take a look at some of the top-performing posts for each of these brands, we can see that they were also giveaways.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-jenis-ice-cream-700x613.png\")
<\/p>\nThis indicates that good culture is on the right track when it comes to its method for increasing its audience size on Instagram. As a next step in the competitive analysis, the brand could compare its engagement rates or post types to its competitors to identify other areas it could improve on the platform.<\/p>\n
TikTok<\/h3>\n
We can\u2019t forget about TikTok! TikTok is by far the most engaging platform for most brands with a median engagement rate of 5.69%<\/a>, so it\u2019s worth considering for your social strategy if you\u2019re not active there yet.<\/p>\n
Going back to our benchmarking example, let\u2019s take a look at how good culture could use competitive benchmarks to improve its TikTok performance.<\/p>\n
For starters, good culture isn\u2019t nearly as active on TikTok compared to other health food brands. The brand only posted about one video per month during this reporting period. If good culture wanted to invest more time and resources into the channel, they could start by posting at least 1.75 times per week<\/a>, the median posting frequency on TikTok across all industries.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-good-culture-tiktok-videos-700x273.png\")
<\/p>\nAfter good culture steps up its TikTok activity, the brand could look at other competitive benchmarks to increase engagement, reach, and views on the platform. For example, if we take a look at popular topics and hashtags used by other health food brands on TikTok, we can see that good culture hardly mentions any of these in its videos (to be fair, the brand also hasn\u2019t had many opportunities to since they don\u2019t post often).<\/p>\n
![\"Using](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-tiktok-hashtags-700x336.png\")
<\/p>\nTo keep up with the competition, good culture could start by including the most engaging hashtags in their videos like #foodtiktok and #fyp. Seeing what their competitors are talking about on TikTok can also help good culture brainstorm relevant content ideas so they can publish videos on a regular basis.<\/p>\n
Twitter<\/h3>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-good-culture-tweets-700x181.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Rival](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-top-landscape-tweets-700x330.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.rivaliq.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/competitive-benchmarks-spindrift-700x441.png\")
<\/p>\n