2024 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report

2024 Social MediaIndustry Benchmark Report Industry benchmarks across the most important social media metrics Introduction We’re back with a supercharged version of our annual Social Media Industry Benchmark Report.We surveyed thousands of the most engaging brands and companies on social to analyze what’sreally making them so successful. The Benchmarks: Our biggest report ever features the most important metrics from2023 across 14 top industries: •Alcohol•Fashion•Financial Services•Food & Beverage•Health & Beauty•Higher Education•Home Decor•Influencers•Media•Nonprofits•Retail•Sports Teams•Tech & Software•Travel This report has everything you need to measure your social media success against yourcompetitors onFacebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagramacross these 14 major industries. Wealso feature tons of insights about how social media engagement has changed over the last yearfor these industries so you can optimize your strategy in 2024.As usual, we havechannelobservations, best post types, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok hashtags, and more. Now let’s get benchmarking. Key takeaways Brands saw (a little) less organicengagement this year Reels overtook video on InstagramIf you’re not posting Reels, you’re officiallymissing out on the most engaging posttype by rate on the ‘gram. TikTok engagement rates dropped by about50% this year, but Facebook engagement ratesactually increased a little, so it’s not all bad. TikTok is (still) topping the charts Posting frequency varied With a median engagement rate of 2.63%,TikTok still performed better than anyother channel by a mile this year. Post frequency increased a little on Instagramand TikTok while decreasing on Facebookand Twitter. Higher Ed and Sports Teams arestill the industries to beat It’s all about the holiday hashtags Once, again, almost every industry earned topengagement rates from holiday-hashtaggedposts. These industries outperformed theircompetitors thanks to a smart combo ofquality content and frequent posting. Methodology To spot trends and identify benchmarks, we used Rival IQ to analyze engagement rates, postingfrequency, post types, and hashtags on the top four social channels for brands:Facebook,Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. We defineengagement as measurable interaction on organic and boosted social media posts,including likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares, and reactions.Engagement rate iscalculated based on all these interactions divided by total follower count. We provide a representative sample of national and international companies in each industry byselecting150 companies at random from each industry in our database of over 200,000companies. Companies selected had active presences on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitteras of January 2023, and had Facebook fan counts between 25,000 and 1,000,000 and minimumInstagram, TikTok, Twitter followers of 5,000 as of the same date. We usedmedian performancefrom the companies selectedfor each industry to compile the data for this report. Who’s included in this study? 2,100 COMPANIES 150 FROM EACH OF THE FOLLOWING 14 INDUSTRIES: The stats The Benchmarks Why do we benchmark? Social media success is about so much more thangetting the most comments or likes:it’s aboutincreasing engagement while also growing ormaintaining the percentage of your audiencethat engages as you expand your audience. With that core metric in mind, we include adetailed look ateach industry’s engagementrate alongside posting frequency, postmedia types, hashtags, and more for a truesense of social performance. In addition to our socialmedia industry breakdowns,we also compareall theindustries together so youcan see how things shakeout across the board. To us, engagement rate per post isthe metricbecause it controls for post volume and audiencesize and helps marketers understand how they’redoing in relation to their competitors. Why can’t you gauge success on likes alone? Because audience size is hugely important: 1,000likes makes a huge difference to a brand with2,000 followers, but is a drop in the bucket to abrand with 100,000 followers. Quick note:the truest measure of your social content’s resonance would beengagement divided by unique reach (the count of unique people who sawyour content) or impressions (the number of times your content wasdisplayed). Unfortunately, due to the Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and TwitterAPI restrictions, we aren’t able to include this particular stat. Start measuring your social performance Ready to compare your social mediaperformance live? Check out ourExplorelandscapes, where we featurelive social mediametrics from a sample of companies fromeach industry represented in this study.These landscapes feature hashtag performance,top post types, and so much more on Facebook,Instagram, and Twitter. Or, run afreeHead-to-Head reportagainstyour biggest rival to see how you measure up toboth your competition and against industrybenchmarks represented in