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  Article updated: July 30, 2024

Compare your performance with your industry average

Industry benchmarking lets you compare your social performance against the average of similar brands who do the same type of work you do. This makes it easier to understand how you’re performing compared to key industry players, and helps you identify what’s working and ways to improve.

You can compare metrics such as audience growth, engagement, posting frequency, and more across your Pages and accounts.

Industry and competitive analysis benchmarking video.

Choose your industry

To get started, you’ll first need to select your industry. Follow these steps to choose your industry:

  1. Go to Analytics, and then select Analytics settings.
    Analytics settings highlighted in the hootsuite analytics navigation.
  2. Select Industry, and then choose the industry that most closely matches the work you do.
  3. If your industry isn’t on the list, select Can’t find your industry and let us know which industry you’re in. We’re always expanding our list of available industries, and when we add yours to our list, we’ll let you know.
  4. When you’re finished, close Analytics settings.

Need to update your industry? You can always select a different industry from your Analytics settings or from the Compare list.

compare list where you can select an industry

Customize your view

Choose what data you’d like to compare and how to display it in your view. You have the following options to customize your view:

  • Choose a social account to compare. Select the social account you’d like to compare against your industry average. You can only compare one social account at a time.
    social account list where you can select an account
  • Change your date range. Select Change date range and choose the time frame you want to compare against your industry.
    calendar to choose a date range
    You’ll find industry benchmarking data for Facebook, Instagram Business, Twitter, and LinkedIn starting with January 2022. For TikTok, we provide industry benchmarking data starting with April 2022. If a date range is grayed out, that means we don’t have any data for that period of time.
  • Display your data differently. You can display your results in a table or a chart. Select Settings on the top right, and then turn on View as charts to display your data in a chart. Turning this off will display your data in a table.
    settings with view as charts option enabled
  • Analyze metrics that matter to you. Search for a metric that you’d like to compare against your industry average.
    search field where you can search for a metric

Compare performance and review tips to improve

Check out the metric cards at the top of your view to understand where you stand in comparison with your industry average. You’ll also see recommendations, tips, and next steps you can take to improve your strategy and results.

Select a metric card to see your results in the chart or table below. We refresh industry data every day for the last 30 days.

Export your Industry benchmarking view

Select Export to export your view to PDF. Your export includes all the benchmarking data in your view. However, it does not include the recommendations and tips in the metric cards.

How we collect and calculate industry averages

We collect industry data from the social accounts connected to Hootsuite. We then group the data anonymously by industry and social network. This means that no data can be traced back to a specific social account in Hootsuite.

To make sure the benchmarking data is relevant and valuable, we collect data from a minimum of 100 accounts to calculate an industry average. For example, we calculate an industry average for Twitter by collecting data from a minimum of 100 Twitter accounts.

 

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