Beyond Social

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

• Vista Social • Episode 29

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How do you know if your social strategy is working? No, seriously; how do you really know?


In this episode of Beyond Social, hosts Reggie Azevedo and Vitaly Veksler, dive into the power of industry benchmarking. Forget vague goals and gut feelings, it’s time to measure your brand against the best (and the rest). From follower counts to engagement rates, they unpack how brands can finally answer the question:


Are we doing enough?


Discover how Vista Social’s new industry insights feature gives brands the clarity they need to set smarter goals, optimize strategies, and actually compete in their market. No more posting into the void.


Whether you're crushing it or barely keeping up, this episode will challenge you to rethink what success on social media looks like. 


Happy listening!



The difficulty of grabbing the social data and unavailability of it, you know, within networks is what kind of makes this report unique, right? So 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 Vitaly and I are head of product here at Vista Social. We're 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 the industry are performing. Right? 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, uh, how it works. Absolutely. I guess the thought process is very sort of straightforward. I'm a brand and I really want to know simple questions, uh, answers to simple questions. I want to know. What is my goal in terms of followers? Listen, if, 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, um, the, for example, how much engagement in your industry sort of 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, right? Otherwise you are just wandering around. I mean, is, uh, five posts a week? Is that what people in my industry do? You will know the answers to these questions. Yeah, that's fair. Now, so when we talk about the specifics of what we can get out of an industry insights report, you know, those are some great questions to answer. What other types of questions are we able to answer with those sort of reports? Yeah, so basically the way we built our feature is that, um, when you connect your social profiles, You sort of organize them sort of as a, as a brand or as in our system, it's called profile groups, 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, um, 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, um, our own sort of view of things. Uh, 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 really sort of long and official names for things. So, that's okay. Where does that come from, by the way? I think SIC is some sort of an industry..."Standard Industry Categories" I think 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. So we look, for example, at the followers. So in this particular screen, we are showing that Vista Social, we are in the 70th percentile when it comes to followers, right? So we know that we're better than 70 percent 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. Um, same thing for impressions, we get a whole lot of impressions, we're in 90th percentile. And then you can see that the engagement rate, unfortunately, still a room to grow for us. We have, we are in the 40th percentile. Uh, just basically slightly below average, right? So again, these are on one hand, potentially brutally sort of honest answers or kind of pieces of information. But at the same time, if the marketing team ever wonders, right? How well they are doing. Right? This will really be a good indicator if they are at least putting out the same number of posts. If the engagement rate, it could be either so far off the average industry standards, right? Or maybe so far exceeding them, but it's, it's a valuable perspective. 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, you know, 140, right? And if it's 150, then... Reason to worry. Like you gotta 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. The difficulty of grabbing the social data and unavailability of it, you know, within networks is what kind of makes this report unique, right? So we will give our users a perspective into that. That's fantastic. And I mean, it's tough, right? Sometimes this may lead to tough conversations. Like, we are below, significantly below, let's say, the follower 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's really cool. Just again, another data point, another insights 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, we know the KPIs are most important to us as a brand, but how do I know if I'm moving in the right direction? How do I compare with our competitors in the industry? And I think this is going to be a huge tool to help them make those connections. 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, it's essentially like going back to my exercise example, right? If you are exercising, how do you assess the state, right? Your shape? How do you assess your BMI or your heart rate or your blood pressure? Like how do you know what's normal? 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. Uh, they don't know what their brands are up to and how well they stack up. These reports are anonymized so it's not like, uh, you will be able to pinpoint, uh, a specific customer. I think that part of the, uh, research is within the competitor tracking where you can actually put in, um, your specific competitor and we will tell you specifically how that competitor is performing. But that is, and I think like the competitive tracking is sometimes is what people do use as a way of knowing if they are out there on the right track. 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, what the right one, right? So these could be people with the same problem. So you have to have enough of a sample, right? Yeah. So, and that's the distinction between the competitor analytics, um, which we offer, and I know quite a few other tools kind of have that. Uh, but I think the benchmarking is a lot more telling, um, just in terms of just directionality of where you are headed, or where are you not headed? Hmm. Yeah. So maybe some tough conversations, but it's hard to make, uh, 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 the resources, where they're allocated and how something like this can help them to reach that next milestone, next goal that they have for themselves. Exactly. Great. Thanks Vitaly. I'm excited to check it out. I'm excited to see the feedback as we continue to roll this out. Uh, if you, uh, 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 to this from, which is some, some, some resources for you, right? 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 have that and I'll leave that in description as well. This is probably the most shameless plug for Vista Social in the last couple of episodes, but make sure you check it out. And 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 vistasocial.com/podcast. I'm Reggie. Thanks again for joining us and we'll see you next time.