Benchmarking Strategies to Measure Social Media Engagement

 

What if you obtain 50 click-throughs from a link in a blog post? Is that good? How do you know? The number may or may not seem good, depending entirely on what comparisons you use.

You know what results are good by benchmarking, the process of comparing your statistics to a meaningful standard.

Experts, including Kevin Shively at Simple Measured, and Kevan Lee of Buffer explain four different types of benchmarking strategies.

1. Aspirational benchmarking. Compare yourself to top influencers and top brands in your industry. You can look to Fortune 500 companies, the Inc 5000 or Forbes 100 best small businesses.

2. Trended benchmarking. Examine your previous activity to establish goals, projections and standards. Lee cites his Twitter activity as an example. His tweets received 73,556 impressions and 1,782 total engagements over the past 28 days. He divides the total engagements by the total impressions to arrive at an engagement rate of 2.4 percent. That means is his Twitter engagement benchmark 2.4 percent: 2.4 percent of those who see a tweet should click, favorite, retweet, or reply.

3. Earned benchmarking. You can compare performance to your previous campaigns, especially successful campaigns, as well as case studies and similar campaigns when data is obtainable. Earned benchmarks serve as ideal comparisons for new campaigns and promotions.

4. Competitive benchmarking. Establish goals and baselines based on direct competitors. These benchmarks are particularly valuable for startups and new entrants to industries. One technique is simply to record the number of followers and other information on competitors’ social media profiles, and compute an average. To find top competitors in a niche, scan LinkedIn’s Pulse discover section, search Twitter bios on Followerwonk, or do a BuzzSumo Influencer search.

Then benchmark their statistics. For Facebook, you can pull stats from other pages into your own Facebook insights. Go to the Pages to Watch section at the bottom of your Facebook Insights page and click on the Add Pages button and find pages.

Steps to Engagement Benchmarking

Select your stats. Your business objectives should guide your goals. If you want to build relationships with your customers, the numbers of followers or fans and comments are ideal statistics. Other common metrics include:

• total engagement as measured by the total number of likes, shares, replies and clicks
• reach/impresseions, and
• clicks.

Statistics can cover:

Stats per day. Add up the total number of what you’re tracking, — be it new followers or shares – for the day. Compare the number to other days over the near- and long-term. The stats provide an overview, their disadvantage is that they don’t take into account variables like how often you post that day.

Stats per post. While some days see more activity than others, some posts have more readers and engagement than others. Stats per post can be computesd as a per-post average.

Stats per follower. Divide your chosen stat by the number of followers. If you have reach/impression data, you can divide the statistic by the number of people who saw the post.

Some, such as Matt Kapco, question the value of engagement statistics as mere vanity metrics with no relationship to business goals. Kapco urges companies to focus less on social engagement and concentrate on achieving demonstrable mission-critical sales goals and other objectives. Mark Traphagen, however, argues that engagement does matter and engagement data can offer worthwhile insights. Disregarding engagement can result in loss of valuable information, he says.  Either way, any informational gold in engagement metrics can be unearthed only by benchmarking results.

Bottom Line: In most every aspect of PR and marketing, proper benchmarking against goals, trends, established standards, or competitors’ results is essential to obtain in-depth understanding of the real value a program or campaign produces.