Competitive benchmarking is an invaluable tool in social media management.
Brands compete for reach, growth, engagement, conversions, and all from the same target audience.
Do you know your competitors?
Are you the first to see if their growth accelerates or slows down?
How can you determine the growth rate of your competitors on social media?
It will be explained in accessible, easily understood steps. Our Sociality.io is our tool of choice. We believe you’ll understand why.
This walkthrough will demonstrate different social networks. These steps can be applied to any social network. This guide can help you track the growth of your competitors, regardless of which social media network you use.
This is thanks to the followers pro unified dashboard, which makes managing multiple accounts and accounts on different networks easy click here.
What is follower growth in social media?
Follower growth on social media is measured by dividing the net number of new followers/subscribers over follower count at the starting date. You can track your followers to help you estimate the efforts of your social media teams. While follower growth on social networks is a vanity metric, most social media teams include it as part of their KPIs.
What are some excellent follower growth rates?
It is easy to track the growth of your account followers over time. This can be done in Excel or manually. How can you determine if your profiles are growing at the correct speed? And how do you optimize your strategies?
Different sources indicate platform-related benchmarks. It ranges from 1.5% to 2.5% on Instagram, 2.2% on Facebook, and 4% on Twitter.
However, it is impossible to establish exact benchmarks with aggregated data pools.
Not only do follower growth rates differ from industry to industry, but they also vary from country to country. Using common sense, it is possible to expect Instagram profiles in India to grow quickly but slower for B2B businesses that offer consultations on outsourcing software development.
Socilaity.io is a solution that allows teams to establish accurate benchmarks for reasonable follower growth rates. Connect competitors to our system, and we will show you historical follower growth rates. It is possible to combine the growth charts of your competitors and your social media accounts into one growth chart and visually assess your performance.
How do you calculate follower growth?
A simple formula to increase followers on social media platforms.
Follower growth rate = Net followers / Starting follower count * 100%
If you had 30K subscribers at the start of the month, you now have 35K.
Follower growth rate = (35K-30K)/30K*100%=16,6%
Tracking your follower net with free tools
Many social media analytics tools can automate monitoring your followers and those of your competitors.
We have created an excel table to help you with a tight budget. These tables offer different views that allow you to track the growth of your followers daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly.
Fake followers: The problem
Social media teams often put in a lot of effort to grow followers on social media. They must not only prepare content plans, engage audiences, curate user content, listen to and analyze sentiment, monitor performance metrics, run social media ads, and perform competitor analysis.
Businesses often buy fake followers to cut costs. Check out this article to find out more about fake followers.
How to track the growth rate of competitors’ followers on social media
Visit the section Competitors.
We start with the Competitor Analysis module.
You can choose all relevant competitors whose growth you want to track. While you can choose to focus on the one with the most similar target audience as yours, that will not give you the whole picture. You might want to try a few.
Select a social media platform
It would help if you now chose the appropriate social network: Facebook or Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or Twitter.
If you are interested in analyzing the growth of your competitors’ followers across social networks, you can always go back to this step.
A single social network at a given time makes it easier to present and analyze data.
Time frame
Next, choose the period you wish to monitor your competitors’ growth.
If you are only interested in the growth of your competitors’ followers, choose a shorter one. You can also set the start point further if you are interested in how it has changed over time.
You can choose the dates that you prefer. The preset options on the left can be used to quickly and easily retrieve data for the last seven days, 30 days, or the beginning, middle, and end of the year.
Create the report
Once you have selected the best filters and options that will give you the most relevant results, click “Create” to see the report.
Here is where the real fun begins.
Let’s look at all the data you will receive and how it can reveal your competitors’ growth rates.
For example, we’ll use similar brands such as Taco Bell, Burger King, Taco Bell, and Starbucks. These brands will be easy to replace with the direct and indirect competition.
Remember, these methods are just as effective if we are trying to determine our competitors’ growth rates.
Total Followers
It’s best to have a current view of your competitors’ following size if you want to monitor their growth rate.
This is vital. It is essential. Without it, it will be challenging to determine what, for example, a 400-user average follower growth rate means within the context of the brand. It doesn’t matter if the brand has only a handful of followers. It’s not so big if it has many thousand followers.
This will also give you a lot more perspective if you analyze multiple competitors simultaneously. This will allow you to see how your competitors stack up against one another.
Followers
The Followers chart shows you how your competitors’ total followers have changed over time.
This is a rough estimate of brand growth, but it’s not apparent. It is essential to know the fluctuations in your competitors’ followers for other types of analysis. We only pay attention to the growth rate when specifically analyzing it.
Growth in Followers
Here is where you should focus your attention.
You can quickly distinguish between positive and negative growth using a handy line (color schemes can be changed in settings).
You can also observe the growth of your competitors every day.
The Growth of Followers chart can zoom in on significant periods and point out industry-wide trends.
Next is the Growth Rate Summary bar, which allows you to zoom in again and take a more detailed look.
Automatically check the growth rates of your competitors.
Yes, automatically!
These steps will allow you to keep an eye on the growth of your competitors. Return to the top, and click on the schedule icon more info.
Then you can schedule reports to be automatically sent to your email.
You can do it at any frequency that you choose.
According to the Content Marketing Institute report, 52% of marketing departments are short on time. We understand.
Automated reports make it easy to be productive without having to sweat a bit.
It is as simple as sending an email to get your complete report.
You need to know this to see how your competitors are growing on social media. Follow these steps with particular attention to the fourth, and you’re good!
There are competitors with a growth rate that you can calculate now. We’ll let you do the math. Keep checking back for more insights and guides.
