We’re finally in 2021 with a new survey that is unveiling the social media industry benchmarks so, you can have a fair idea about where your brand is currently positioned against industry standards. After looking into over 22 million posts on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter from 35 industries and having made the comparison between the social media performance of 2019 and 2020.
The purpose behind this exercise was to find out the social media engagement rate for each industry, to understand their frequency of postings, and to discover what mix of photos and videos they use across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. So how do you get a sense of how well your Instagram posts are performing, in comparison to other social channels?
Recently, Sked Social did a survey to analyze over 102 million Instagram business posts, comparing performance over time, to get a fair idea of the latest engagement benchmarks in the app.
The survey came out with some interesting insights, including:
Now, Instagram’s overall engagement rate is almost at the same level of 2019, following a spike during the first half of 2020. That spike was most probably caused by the pandemic that appears to have normalized by now.
It’s Carousel posts that generate the maximum engagement, especially for smaller accounts having under 5000 followers.
Generally, short captions that contain less than 10 words work best, though longer captions of 30 words or more work better on video posts.
People are usually more likely to comment on video posts
It was found that now more and more brands have been switching to Instagram for the customer journey. Talking of social media performance, Instagram drives the most conversations around the brand.
In areas such as politics, education, and airline categories, Instagram is a primary marketing channel for the strategies focused on awareness and conversions.
Instagram – average engagement rate per post
In 2020, brands preferred Twitter to other social channels. There were 36% more content on Twitter compared with Instagram and Facebook.
Compared to 2019, most verticals chose to publish more content on Facebook and Twitter, while on Instagram, the amount was more or less same.
There was significant increase observed in the posting frequency on the Facebook in the magazine-journal pages, press agencies, and sports-media pages.
A remarkable increase was seen in pages from e-commerce, finance, education, governmental, airlines, magazines and journals, media houses, NGOs, press agencies, professional associations, retail, services, sports-media, and telecommunications, etc.
Moreover, sports-media pages take the leading position on Facebook. There were 2.05 posts per day on Instagram in comparison to 1.8 average posts on Twitter.
According to the data available, it was observed that the posting frequency on Instagram dropped by about 6.22% in 2020, compared with the figure of 2019.
However, it’s important to add that this report doesn’t include Stories data where more businesses are now looking.
Posting frequency on Instagram
Images are the most preferred mode of posting on all three platforms. In fact, images are the most popular form of posts, regardless of social channel – Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Connectd India.
Images were the most widely used mode of posting across the board, but more so for channels such as Facebook and Instagram, or Connectd India where most brands are using them for over 50% of their entire content.