Benchmark or Bust: Why Brands Can’t Afford to Fly Blind

The difficulty of grabbing the social data and the unavailability of it within networks is what kind of makes this report unique. We will give our users a perspective into that.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Beyond Social podcast. I’m Reggie, one of your hosts, and today Vitali and I, head of product here at This Social, are going to be chatting through industry insights, industry analytics, and benchmarking. I think every brand really has an opportunity here to try to understand how other brands in their industry are performing.

How do we then, without knowing how other brands are doing, how do we identify that North Star for the metrics that we’re tracking? How do we know whether what we’re doing is good enough and how fast we’re growing or how often we’re posting? It is aligned with what we should be doing. I’d love to chat through that feature that we just released and how it works.

The Fundamental Questions Every Brand Should Ask

Absolutely. I guess the thought process is very straightforward. I’m a brand and I really want to know simple questions, answers to simple questions. I want to know what is my goal in terms of followers. Listen, if you have 100 followers today and you may want a million, but let’s say if most of your competitors have a thousand, chances are by reaching a thousand you’ll be, you know, nicely positioned.

You want to know how often to post. You want to know, for example, how much engagement in your industry is sort of accepted, acceptable or comparable to others. So you have quite a few things that you really want to establish as sort of a basis for where you need to end up in. Otherwise, you are just wandering around. I mean, is five posts a week is that what people in my industry do? You would know the answers to these questions.

How Industry Categorization Works

Yeah, so basically the way we built our feature is that when you connect your social profiles, you sort of organize them as a brand or in our system, it’s called profile group, sort of like a group of profiles that are related, right? So typically, that’s a brand. The system will, in our case, automatically categorize them using AI into a particular industry category and then look at thousands of other profiles in this category for each network to try to understand the patterns. So, for example, here I have our own sort of view of things.

So we are categorized as the official industry term for our category is computer programming, data processing and other related computer services. So you will see in industry reports these very sort of long and official names for things, so that’s okay.

Where’s that come from by the way?

I think SIC is some sort of an industry standard industry categories, the acronym. It’s an acronym, and you can look them up. There are these four-digit, five-digit codes for basically every industry out there. So it’s a fairly standardized thing.

Understanding Your Performance Percentiles

So we look, for example, at the followers. So in this particular screen, we are showing that Vista Social, we are in the 77th percentile in terms of followers, right? So we know that we are better than 70% of our competitors. Obviously, we want to go higher, understandably, right?

When it comes to, say, for example, published content, look at this, we are in the 90th percentile. We publish more content than an average competitor out there. Same thing for impressions, we get a whole lot of Impressions when a 90th percentile.

And then you can see that the engagement rate unfortunately still has room to grow for us. We are in the 40th percentile, just basically slightly below average. So again, these are on one hand potentially brutally honest answers or kind of pieces of information, but at the same time, if the marketing team ever wonders right how well they’re doing, this will really be a good indicator if they are at least putting out the same number of posts.

The Health Check Analogy

It’s almost like for anybody to know, you know, what’s my, I don’t know heart rate after I run a mile. What’s a good heart rate for a human being, right? Well, there’s like plenty of stats that say like for a male, 45, 200 pounds, your heart rate has got to be 140, right? And if it’s 150 then reason like you got to begin to maybe taking care of yourself a little better. Like if you want 30, then you got issues on the other side. So it’s a valuable insight that we use in all aspects of our lives.

Historical Tracking and Growth Patterns

That’s fantastic. And it, I mean, it’s tough, right? Sometimes this may lead to tough conversations, like we arebelow significantly below, let’s say, the follow count, but if we’re seeing that the engagement rate is higher than average, we’re likely moving in the right direction, right?

And I like how this is historical as well. So we can go back and we can see how we compared. Is there a growth pattern? Are we seeing month over month, quarter over quarter that we’ve gone from the 40th percentile to the 60th or to the 70th percentile? So that that’s really cool. Just again, another data point, another insight for our our customers, for agencies, for brands to be able to understand what should be our goals because I mean, we know the metrics that we want to track.

Why Most Brands Are Flying Blind

Absolutely. And I think we often talk about how some tools are of such significant importance that it’s remarkable that these tools aren’t part of the, sort of, the toolkit for a lot of people, a lot of users, right? This obviously is biased, you know, we built the feature and everything, right?

But to me, not having the Benchmark is essentially like going back to my exercise example, right? If you are exercising, how do you assess the state? Your shape? How do you assess your BMI or your heart rate or your blood pressure? Like, how do you know what’s normal, right? Unless you have the stats on what’s normal and like, you know, where you need to be.

But I would say majority of brands out there are not necessarily even aware of the industry benchmarks. They don’t even know where they are in in in the spectrum, right? Of of performance. They don’t know what their brands are up to and how well they stock up.

Benchmarking vs. Competitor Tracking

These reports are anonymized so it’s not like you will be able to pinpoint a specific customer. I think that part of the research is within the competitor tracking where you can actually put in your specific competitor and we will tell you specifically how that competitor is performing. But that is, and I think like the competitor tracking is sometimes is what people do use as a way of knowing if they are out there on the right track, right?

Right. But I think it’s very, it’s almost like again back to my health sort of example, it’s like if I have five people of whom I know what the heart rate is, do I truly know what what the right one, right? So this could be people with the same problem. So you have to have enough of a sample, right? So and that’s the distinction between the competitor analytics, which we offer and I know quite a few other tools kind of have that, but I think the benchmarking is a lot more telling, just in terms of just directionality of where you are headed or where you’re not headed.

Making Data-Driven Improvements

Yeah, yeah. So maybe some tough conversations but it’s hard to make improvements without introspection, right? And be able to see what’s happening, what’s going on. Correct. Where do I move the needle? And this could be a great opportunity for brands, agencies, to start looking at their resources, where they’re allocated and how something like this can help them to to reach that next milestone, next goal that they have for themselves.

Exactly. Sweet. Thanks for the time. I’m excited to check it out. I’m excited to see the feedback as we continue to roll this out. If you, maybe didn’t join us on YouTube or Spotify, this was the perfect episode to watch instead of listen. But if you if you’re curious, go back and see if you can pick this up on YouTube or Spotify so you can watch some of those screens.

We’ll leave some notes in the description, regardless of where you’re listening this from, which is some some some resources for you, right? We we’ve got some screenshots, we’ve got some videos that’ll show you our industry Benchmark reports. Make sure to grab a 14-day trial. We we have that and we’ll leave that in description as well.

This is probably the most shameless plug for this social in the last couple of episodes. But make sure you check it out. If you have any questions, if you want to get featured in one of our upcoming episodes, get interviewed, have your agency your brand featured here, make sure to head over to our website.

Podcast, I’m Reggie. Thanks again for joining us and we’ll see you next time.