Benchmarking Against The Best

One important part of being a successful social media marketer is your habit of being open-minded to new ideas and willingness to learn from the best. This is where benchmarking yourself to a competitor, or to popular pages outside of your sector, helps you gain insights that allow you to evolve your strategy. One very useful fact about social media compared to more traditional industries is that in social media all the most important data is public. Even the data of your competitors. You can simply visit the biggest Facebook page in your sector and see what they are doing, how they are doing it and what results they are achieving. How many likes do they have? How much engagement do their posts achieve? What type of content do they post? When do they post it?

Comparing and benchmarking your efforts to the best helps you identify efficient practices, understand what your level is, what the weaknesses of your current social media strategy are and which tactics you can adopt to improve the quality and effectiveness of your activities. Reviewing effective pages should be one of the things every social media marketer does in his or her daily routine. If nothing else, benchmarking gives you confirmation that you are on the right path and doing things well.

Benchmarking is not necessarily only about your competitors. You can even benchmark yourself against another page that you own. For example, if your company runs several multilingual pages for the same product, benchmarking can help you become more consistent with branding, tone of voice. Further, you can make the workload more efficient by sharing the best practices and reusing the most engaging content. Let’s take a deeper look into what insightful data you can gain from social media benchmarking.

What data can I get from social media benchmarking?

The total size of the page. Use this to simply compare yourself to your biggest competitors. Where do you stand? How does this differ from the general market sizes of the brands? In some situations you might find that a smaller company has a stronger Facebook audience. Way to go social media team!
The growth of the page. How quickly is the competitor page growing in the recent period compared to your page? If there is a clear trend it is worth exploring the reasons for it.
Geographical split of the fans on the page. Where are the fans from? Which country engages the most? This might give you intelligence into which territories your company could focus on in the future.
The posting frequency. How much content is your competitor creating compared to you? This will help you identify how important social media and content is to their overall strategy. If you find that the volume of content you produce is consistently inferior to that of your competitors’, it might be worth raising this with the management. Perhaps as a result you’re able to secure more investment in your own social media team.
What type of content is being posted? Which post type is the most effective in terms of engagement? Are you posting these post types too? If you are not, you may consider including more of these post types in your own content calendar. Speak to the content creation team in order to arrange for relevant pieces of content to be created.
Number of engagements. Don’t only look at the total engagement number, but look at what the actual engagement rate is. Engagement rate is calculated by counting the number of people who have engaged with the post (clicked on the link, liked, commented, shared) and dividing that number by the reach. This helps get a more accurate picture of the page engagement.
Which days get the most engagement? Is your competitor onto something by publishing content during the evenings and weekends? If so, then you may want to raise this with the management – social media is a 24/7 activity and there might be a need for more flexible working hours in your team beyond Monday to Friday 9 to 5.
What actual posts have the most engagement? I love looking at this because it is a gold mine for inspiration, ideas and innovation. Are competitions working the best? Do the posts have a call-to-action? Do they feature questions? How is the copy written and structured? What kind of multimedia is used? How can you use this intelligence as inspiration to create something similar or better for your own brand?
Which words are trending on the page? What are the people that comment on the page actually saying? This could be a way of gaining some insights into the needs and wants of your audience, as well as other feedback that can help you improve your own product and offering.
Who are the top influencers on the page? Are there some super-fans who are very loyal to your competitor? Maybe an influential journalist or a blogger? Is there a way you can get them to check out your own product and page too?

Social Media Benchmarking – A step-by-step guide

So how do you actually do the benchmarking? Facebook allows you to add “Pages to Watch” which gives you data such as total number of page likes, new page likes, number of posts published in the week and the total number of engagements (likes, comments, shares) on posts. It’s very simple and useful. Beyond this summary, doing benchmarking is a more laborious process. You will need to manually collect lots of data. Most probably you will also need to hire a data scientist to mine through that data and give you some valuable insights. Locowise can speed this process up for you. Follow these instructions if you would like to benchmark the performance of your own page to other pages:

Click on “Add Profile” in the top right corner in your Locowise account.
Click “Facebook Benchmark” (benchmarking works also for Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn).
Type in the full Facebook page URL of the competitor page and click “Search”.
When Locowise identifies the correct page click “Confirm”.
The competitor page will now be listed in the “profiles you are tracking” list in your account overview and will be marked as “benchmark”.
Simply tick the box next to the pages you would like to benchmark and click “Compare Selected”.

This displays the benchmarking report. Review the simple charts (feel free to get inspired by the ideas earlier in the article for things to look at), discuss internally in the social media team or with the management. Formulate a plan based on the insights you have gathered and take some action. Locowise allows you to download the benchmark report in PDF, PowerPoint and Excel formats for easier distribution within the company.

For quick future access to your benchmark report you should add a benchmark label by following these instructions:

Tick the box next to the pages you would like to add to the benchmark label.
Click “Add Benchmark Label” in the top line menu.
Type in the name for your new label and click “Add Label”.
This new label will now be displayed under “Dashboards” on your Locowise account overview.
Simply click “View” to enter the benchmarking report.

Benchmark yourself against the best, identify effective practices and evolve your strategy by adopting those same practices in order to beat your competitors. You have no excuse not to do it.

How To Boost Your Social Media Performance By Benchmarking Against The Best

Social Media Benchmarking – A step-by-step guide

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