A week or so ago Lucy Salvage wrote a great piece on how she approached benchmarking on social media platforms.
You can read it for yourself here her account of how she looks at her own channels with a magpie eye not getting too distracted at what others are doing.
This makes loads of sense as only your organisation has your shaped demographics.
In this post, I’m going to take a look at RivalIQ’s report on industry metrics. These are literally millions of posts crunched into the data. I don’t for a second think that you should steer away too far from Lucy’s approach. It’s one I really like. However, a different perspective can sometimes shed some extra light in on your patch of the digital allotment.
So, with that in mind here’s some pointers to keep in mind while you are looking at your own channels. They’re private sector.
Engagement rates across Facebook for 2023 are at 0.6.
This means that if you have 10,000 likes on your page the average engagement would be 60 per post.
The average post per week is 5.04. However, for media this is 73.5 per week. That’s a real outlier. My own yardstick is that if the content is strong enough then post it. I don’t think looking for posts just to fulfill a quota is a wise thing to do.
Engagement rates on Instagram for 2023 are at 0.47 per cent – that’s 30 per cent down compared to last year.
This means that if you have 10,000 likes on your account the average engagement would be 46.9 per post.
Higher education performed the best for engagement with a 2.6 per cent rate. That’s worth knowing if youare after 18 to 21-year-olds. The average posts per week is 4.6.
Reels got twice as much engagement than ordinary video.
Engagement rates for Twitter are at 0.035 per cent.
This means that if you have 3.5 interactions for an account with 10,000 followers you are hitting average engagement.
The industry average for tweets is just 3.9. This figure is often greatly exceeded by the public sector which isn’t in the survey. However, media which is the nearest cousin posts 10 times a day on average.
TikTok
Engagement rates for TikTok are 5.6 per cent – that’s comfortably the largest social channel.
This means that if you have 559 interactions for 10,000 followers you’re hitting the average.
Higher education is comfortably the leader here with an astonishing 16.9 per cent engagement rate.
The average TikToks per week is just over 1.5. That’s maybe a reassuring figure. Media at 4.2 clips every seven days is the highest.
Conclusion
In short, these figures are handy for a broad brush reference. Don’t get too hung up on them. You can read the full RivalIQ report here.