Whether you post organic social media content or invest in paid campaigns, you want to ensure the posts you create to reach your audience and ultimately convert. Industry benchmarks are critical to measure this.

These metrics provide valuable context, highlighting emerging opportunities and potential operational inefficiencies businesses can leverage to achieve success.

Engagement Rate

The most important metric, engagement rates, often tell marketers how invested their audience is in creating content. This metric counts interactions such as likes, reactions, and comments on a post and shares.

Individually, these are vanity metrics, but when combined with other metrics such as reach or impressions, they paint a picture of how effective your content is at building brand connection and driving customer loyalty.

You can also use this metric to benchmark your website against competitors to determine where you stand in the industry. 

Businesses often use social media industry benchmarks in the ever-evolving digital marketing realm. This valuable reference point aids in gauging the effectiveness of their social media strategies and identifying areas for improvement.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is one of the most prominent metrics social media teams track because it illustrates how much value the audience finds in a brand’s content. Whether downloading white papers, scheduling demos, or making purchases, a high conversion rate indicates that users are taking the desired action.

When a company’s conversion rates are compared to industry averages, it is possible to identify structural fluctuations that may cause the numbers to rise and fall. For example, many B2B sites experience substantial traffic drops on weekends when their core users are out of the office. A more extended measurement period for this metric type helps smooth these irrelevant fluctuations. It also enables social media teams to understand which types of content are most effective at driving a conversion.

Reach

If a business wants to be more visible on social media, it must track its reach. Social reach refers to the number of unique people who see a post, whether organic or paid. This metric is often used to determine the impact of brand awareness campaigns since it shows how many people are aware of your business.

To increase their reach, businesses must post relevant and informative content. They can also consider leveraging social ads to target new audiences. The return on ad spend (ROAS) metric helps measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign and can be calculated by dividing revenue generated by the cost of an ad. This metric is important to remember when developing a budget for social media ads.

Influence

Influence may sound like a ho-hum word, but it’s essential to building an effective marketing strategy when used as a social media metric. It refers to the ability of a content piece to impact the audience significantly, such as by increasing brand awareness, driving traffic, or improving customer service.

Another popular metric is tracking web sessions directly attributed to a specific social channel, which provides valuable insights into the overall effectiveness of a marketing campaign. This data type can highlight critical changes that teams need to make, potential operational inefficiencies, and even shifts in consumer behavior.

Through a detailed analysis of performance metrics, organizations can identify best practices that they can implement to improve their operations and gain a competitive edge. This can be done through various means, including internal records, industry reports, or customer surveys.

Retention

Businesses are often motivated to calculate their retention rate for one reason: money. It’s widely understood that it costs significantly more to attract new customers than it does to keep existing ones.

A high retention rate is a critical indicator that your product is providing a sustainable source of revenue for your business. A low retention rate, on the other hand, indicates that your product is failing to deliver the value you promise.

To get a clear picture of how your product is performing, it’s essential to look at retention rate cohorts by month of signup. This will allow you to see precisely when retention starts to decline so that you can take steps to improve your app’s performance. For example, if your users are abandoning your app because they can’t figure out how to use it, you can send them instructional emails that help them make the most of the product.

Jane