Competitive Benchmarking on Social Media: How to Benchmark Against Competitors

Are Reels working in our industry? Is our engagement rate actually good, or just good for us? Which content pillars make people stop scrolling?

These are the questions social media teams ask every time they plan their social media marketing strategy. You could spend months experimenting to answer them. Or you can take the faster route: benchmark your performance against competitors and learn from what's already working in your category, and what isn't.

Benchmarking only pays off when it changes decisions, though. Too often it ends as a spreadsheet nobody reads: it describes the competitive landscape without saying what to do about it. This guide shows you how to avoid that, with a repeatable 6-step process and 10 best practices that turn the numbers into strategy.

Along the way, you'll hear from two experts: Haley Correll, senior director of Content and Channel Strategy at American Red Cross, and Yainire Martínez, social & influencer creative manager at LLYC.

What is competitive benchmarking

Competitive benchmarking is the process of measuring your social media performance against specific competitors to see where you stand, find the gaps, and decide what to change. Instead of looking at your metrics in isolation, it puts them side by side with brands competing for the same audience: engagement rate, follower growth, posting frequency and content performance.

For example, if competitors with a similar audience size are getting higher engagement or growing faster, benchmarking helps you spot that early and investigate what's driving it. It's less about copying what others do and more about understanding where you stand in your category.

What's the difference between competitive benchmarking and competitor analysis?

Competitive benchmarking and competitor analysis are often used interchangeably, but they serve different purposes.

Competitor analysis looks at the bigger picture of your market. It examines how competitors operate across their business, including positioning, messaging, campaigns, product offerings and marketing strategy. The goal is to understand who your competitors are, what they're doing and how they compete.

Competitive benchmarking, on the other hand, focuses on measurable performance. It zooms in on specific metrics and compares your results directly with competitors' to find precise opportunities to improve.

In practice, benchmarking is the part of a full social media competitor analysis that puts numbers on it.

Competitive vs. internal vs. industry benchmarking

The three types of benchmarking answer different questions. Let’s see how they differ and when each one matters:

• Competitive benchmarking compares your performance to specific competitors. You pick a handful of brands (usually 5 to 10) that compete with you for the same audience, and you track relevant metrics. This is the most actionable type: if a competitor is doing something better, you can study exactly what they're doing and decide whether to respond.
• Internal benchmarking compares your current brand data to your historical performance or to performance across different parts of your organization (regions, product lines, or channels). It’s useful to see whether you’re growing, stagnating, or declining.
• Industry benchmarking zooms out to the category or vertical. Instead of comparing yourself to specific competitors, you compare against industry averages. This gives you context that's broader than competitive benchmarking but less specific. It's useful for setting realistic targets and for spotting big shifts in your category.

How to benchmark against competitors on social media

Competitive benchmarking works best as a repeatable process: define what you want to know, choose who to compare against, collect consistent data, and turn the findings into action.

Yainire's team at LLYC follows a similar sequence:

1. “Smart competitor selection: The first step is choosing carefully who we measure ourselves against. We don't limit ourselves to direct rivals; we also include aspirational brands or 'attention leaders' that help us understand what appeals to an audience that isn't just interested in our specific product.
2. Quantitative audit: We gather numerical data to understand, in broad strokes, what market position our competitors hold.
3. Qualitative reverse engineering: We move on to understanding the why by closely analyzing the strategy they follow to achieve those results.
4. Detecting gaps and opportunities: We cross-reference their data with ours to find a gap in the market and locate opportunities in areas they are not reaching.
5. Action plan: As I always say, 'an analysis without action is just a beautiful PDF'. The process truly ends when we translate all these findings into actionable experiments for our own strategy."

Step 1: Set your benchmark questions

Define your benchmark questions before you collect any data. A question forces you to commit to what you want to know, and that dictates everything else: which competitors, which metrics and which timeframe.

The strongest benchmark questions are specific, tied to a decision, and have a clear answer format:

• Vague: "How are we doing on Instagram compared to competitors?"
• Sharp: "Is our Instagram engagement rate above or below the average of our top five competitors over the past 90 days, and which content formats account for the difference?"

Here are a few starter questions:

• Which competitors are growing their following fastest, and what content patterns correlate with that growth?
• How does our posting frequency compare with the category average, and does more frequent posting correlate with higher engagement?
• Which content pillars are competitors investing in that we're underweight on?
• Where are competitors getting their best engagement, and what does that suggest about audience preferences?

This disciplined approach turns social media analysis into strategic input rather than a stack of charts.

Step 2: Choose the competitors you'll benchmark against

The mistake teams make most often is defaulting to the obvious list: the three or four brands everyone in the office mentions. A useful set usually includes five to ten brands, split into groups of three to five direct, indirect and aspirational competitors.

Direct vs. indirect vs. aspirational competitors

Each group tells you something different:

• Direct competitors sell similar products or services to a similar audience. They're the comparisons that matter most for share of voice, positioning and execution.
• Indirect competitors compete for the same audience with different offerings. They show you broader audience behavior.
• Aspirational competitors aren't in direct competition with you. They're often larger or more established, but their audience-building approach is worth learning from.

Keep each group in its own view when you build your benchmarking report. Mixing them into one average blurs the comparison.

A checklist for each competitor

Before adding a brand to your set, run it through this checklist:

• Audience overlap: Does this brand speak to a meaningfully similar audience? High overlap makes the comparison relevant; low overlap means you're comparing apples to oranges.
• Platform presence: Is it active on the platforms you care about, with enough activity to produce meaningful data?
• Content volume: Does it post consistently enough to generate a comparable dataset? As a rough rule, look for brands posting at least weekly on the platforms you're analyzing.
• Business model similarity: Does it operate on a similar business model? If not, it may be a better fit as an indirect or aspirational comparison.
• Comparable size or trajectory: Is it within a reasonable size range, or on a similar growth path? Either pick peers within your size band, or compare rates (engagement rate, growth rate) rather than absolute numbers.

Step 3: Pick your metrics by tier

The trap most teams fall into is tracking everything because it's available, which produces long, irrelevant reports.

A more useful approach is to organize metrics into three tiers:

• Tier 1, strategic: the high-level view that raises questions.
• Tier 2, tactical: the view that points to patterns.
• Tier 3, diagnostic: the view that explains what's happening.

Yainire explains why you need all three:

"We usually focus mainly on quantitative metrics such as interactions, audience size, or the volume of content that competitors upload to social media. However, by looking only at those numbers, we leave behind the most important part: quantitative data gives us the what, but we need to understand the how and the why.

To achieve a deep diagnosis, finding a balance between quantitative and qualitative parameters is fundamental."

Tier 1 (strategic): share of voice, engagement, audience growth rate

Tier 1 metrics give you the high-level view of how you stack up against competitors, and they're the ones that belong in any leadership-facing report.

• Share of voice measures how much of the conversation in your category your brand owns, relative to competitors. A growing share of voice means you're capturing more attention; a shrinking one means competitors are pulling ahead in visibility.
• Engagement at the strategic level is best viewed as engagement rate (interactions divided by followers or reach), rather than raw totals. A deeper social media engagement view matters here, as it normalizes the comparison across brands of different sizes.
• Audience growth rate shows how quickly each brand is adding followers relative to its existing base. Absolute follower counts can be misleading: a brand adding 10,000 followers per month looks impressive until you realize they already have 5 million, and the growth rate is well below the category average.

A profiles summary view, like the Socialinsider one below, pulls these strategic metrics together in one place, so you can see at a glance how each brand in your set is performing across followers, growth, engagement, posting volume, and reach:

In this view, you can see the divergence between the two brands: one is losing followers while the other is steadily adding to its base, even though the larger brand still leads on total engagement and reach. The leader on one metric isn't always the leader on another, and the gaps are useful insights.

Tier 2 (tactical): posting frequency, content format mix, engagement by post type

If Tier 1 tells you a competitor is outgrowing you, Tier 2 starts to show you why:

• Posting frequency tracks how often each brand publishes on each platform. Frequency alone doesn’t paint a complete picture, so it needs to be paired with engagement rate to be meaningful.
• Content format mix breaks down what share of each brand's output is Reels, carousels, images, videos, statuses, and so on. This often reveals where competitors are focusing and where you might want to spend more resources, too.
• Engagement by post type layers performance onto the format mix. A brand might be posting 60% Reels but getting most of its engagement from carousels, which suggests their volume and performance strategies aren't aligned.

A side-by-side dashboard of posting volume, like the one provided by Socialinsider, makes the tactical comparison easy to act on:

Clearly, one brand is posting more consistently and frequently than the other. The next step is to look at whether the higher-volume brand is also generating proportionally higher engagement, or whether they're diluting their performance by posting too often.

Tier 3 (diagnostic): sentiment analysis, content pillar performance, top post analysis

Tier 3 metrics turn benchmarking from a measurement exercise into data-driven marketing — the kind that changes how you plan.

• Sentiment analysis looks at the emotional tone of mentions and comments around each brand, not just the volume.
• Content pillar performance breaks each brand's output into thematic groups — product launches, behind-the-scenes, customer stories, education, seasonal — and shows which pillars are getting the most engagement. 
• Top post analysis zooms in on the individual posts driving results for each brand. Looking at the top three to five posts from each competitor reveals useful patterns: a recurring format, creator partnership, or specific story angle.

I perosnally find it very insightful how Socialinsider’s content pillar view shows how each brand is distributing effort across themes and which pillars are pulling the strongest engagement for them:

A top post view rounds out the diagnostic picture, showing the content driving the biggest results for each brand:

Pulling this kind of view together manually across platforms is almost impossible. A dedicated competitor benchmarking tool saves you time and helps you get actionable insights fast.

Step 4: Collect and curate the data

The goal is a dataset you trust enough to make decisions with. If you're second-guessing the numbers, you'll second-guess the conclusions too.

• Pick platforms where the comparison is fair. If a competitor has a strong Instagram presence but barely posts on LinkedIn, including LinkedIn will produce noisy data. Match platforms to where each competitor is active.
• Choose a long enough timeframe. A single month is rarely enough. Ninety days is a reasonable minimum, and longer windows give you more depth.
• Use the same calculation method for every brand. An engagement rate calculated as interactions over followers for one brand and interactions over reach for another produces a false comparison.
• Pull both quantitative and qualitative inputs. Numbers tell you what's happening; comments, sentiment and visual content patterns tell you why. The most useful benchmarking reports include both.
• Centralize your social media data collection. Pulling data manually from each platform for each competitor is the fastest way to introduce errors and burn out. Use a tool that aggregates data across platforms and provides comparative dashboards.

Step 5: Find where you lead, lag and have untapped opportunity, then act

Sort every finding into one of three categories. A finding that doesn't fit any of them is probably an observation, not an insight.

• Where you lead is anywhere you outperform the competitor average, such as a content pillar where your engagement is higher or a platform where you're growing faster. Work out what's driving it, and keep doing it.
• Where you lag is where your brand performance trails the category, such as formats where competitors get more engagement or platforms where you're growing more slowly. The question here is diagnosis: is the gap a resource problem, a creative problem or a strategy problem? The answer determines what you do next.
• Where there's untapped potential is something neither you nor your competitors are doing, like a relevant theme everyone is ignoring or a social media trend nobody has picked up. The question is whether the gap exists because no one has tried (an opportunity) or because your audience isn't interested (a trap).

Then turn each finding into an action. As Yainire put it, an analysis without action is just a beautiful PDF. Here's how she uses benchmarking to drive decisions:

To me, competitive benchmarking is not an optional step; it is the foundation of any digital ecosystem, and its influence on decisions is total:

In content (avoiding homogenization): Comparative analysis is not used to determine 'what to publish,' but rather to identify what to stop publishing because the market is already saturated. It allows you to see if your content has fallen into the homogenization trap: if you cover your brand's logo and your competitor's logo, and the posts look exactly the same, you have a differentiation problem. By understanding which formats and narratives are overexploited, you consciously decide to look for the 'blue ocean' of content.

In business (spotting opportunities): It helps you detect positioning opportunities or service gaps. For example, if by analyzing the competition's comments you notice that their customers constantly complain about slow customer service, the business decision is clear: we will structure our value proposition and our communication around immediacy and human support.

To get there, pair every finding with a specific action, an owner, a timeframe and a metric. Those actions feed back into your social media content strategy, which is what makes benchmarking compound over time.

Step 6: Report to stakeholders and set a cadence

How you report determines whether your benchmarking influences decisions or sits unread on a shared drive. A few principles for impactful benchmarking reports:

• Lead with the headline, not the methodology. Stakeholders want to know what you found and what you're going to do about it.
• Frame every chart with a takeaway. A chart without an interpretive sentence leaves the analysis to your audience. State the insight clearly.
• Match the depth to the audience. A weekly review with the social team can go deep into post-level data. A quarterly readout with the CMO should stay strategic; for executive reporting, keep it brief.
• Show the trend, not just the snapshot. A single quarter of data is easy to argue with. Three or four quarters of consistent movement is much harder to dismiss.

For a full structure, including what to put in each section and how to present the findings, see our guide to building a competitive analysis report.

Then set a cadence. Without a regular rhythm, benchmarking becomes reactive: a rushed analysis after a competitor's move catches leadership's attention. The right rhythm depends on how fast your category moves and how much capacity your team has:

• Monthly works well for fast-moving B2C categories, such as consumer brands, entertainment, and anything where trends turn over quickly.
• Quarterly is the most common rhythm and a good default for most B2B brands. It gives you enough data to spot trends, leaves room for proper analysis, and lines up with planning cycles.
• Semiannual or annual deep dives step back from operational metrics to look at category-level changes, repositioning by major competitors, and big shifts in audience behavior.

Platform-specific benchmarks to compare your competitors against

This is something I say whenever I'm asked about benchmarks: what counts as "good" engagement or growth varies enormously between platforms. That’s why you need platform-specific social media benchmarks.

For a full, updated reference across platforms and industries, the Socialinsider social media benchmarks report is a good place to anchor your analysis. That's usually my starting point for every analysis.

Based on those, through the sections below I'll highlight a few patterns to keep in mind when you're framing your own benchmarking work.

Engagement benchmarks

Engagement benchmarks vary widely by platform. Across the major platforms, TikTok continues to sit well above the rest, while Facebook and X hold steady at much lower averages:

This doesn’t necessarily mean that one platform is better than another, but that engagement rate has to be interpreted in context and that performance on each platform needs different kinds of optimization.

On Instagram, carousels continue to hold their position as the most reliable format for engagement, with Reels close behind and static images trailing:

Facebook tells a different story. Status posts — the simplest, most text-driven format — are outperforming more produced content types, while Reels have closed the gap significantly year over year:

LinkedIn's format hierarchy is the most differentiated of any major platform, with native documents (carousels and PDFs) leading the pack by a meaningful margin:

Follower growth benchmarks

Follower growth benchmarks have shifted noticeably in the past year, and the patterns differ by platform and account size. According to recent Socialinsider data, growth has slowed across most platforms compared to the prior year, and the slowdown is sharper in certain follower tiers.

On Instagram, audience growth has cooled across every size band, with the steepest declines hitting mid-to-large accounts:

Lesson here: growth targets set against last year's numbers are likely to feel unreachable. If you're a 100K-1M account holding flat year over year, you're not falling behind, but tracking close to the category average.

Facebook is the outlier in the growth story. Mid-sized pages in the 10K-50K range have grown significantly, while larger pages are growing modestly but more consistently than in the prior year. Socialinsider data shows that Facebook remains a viable growth platform for brands in the mid-size tier, even as Instagram and LinkedIn slow down.

Socialinsider LinkedIn data suggests that audience growth at scale is getting harder, and brands with established large followings should expect more modest gains than in prior years. Smaller accounts are still growing meaningfully, just at a slower pace.

TikTok shows the same trend — growth is slowing — but the absolute numbers are still well above those of other platforms, especially for smaller accounts. Smaller TikTok accounts are still seeing triple-digit growth rates, which means TikTok benchmarking requires a different scale entirely from other platforms.

10 best practices for benchmarking social media competitors

The six steps tell you what to do. These best practices, shaped by Haley Correll's experience at American Red Cross, are about doing it well.

1. Start with the right benchmarking goal

Treat your first benchmark question as a hypothesis, not a conclusion, and look at the metrics around your main KPI too. Benchmarking often shows the real gap is somewhere else. Haley shared an example:

At a previous organization, the team believed their main problem was slow follower growth. Once we started benchmarking those competitors more closely, we realized follower count wasn't the real difference. The biggest gap was actually in save and share rates. Our competitors were publishing evergreen, educational content that people wanted to revisit or send to friends. Our team was posting timely content that performed well in the moment but was quickly forgotten.

Once the content strategy changed, follower growth improved naturally. It was a great reminder that benchmarking often reveals what is actually driving success.

2. Choose the right competitors to benchmark against

Direct competitors with a similar follower count usually make the best benchmarking group: a brand with 20K followers operates very differently from one with 2 million. Add one aspirational brand whose content strategy you admire for creative inspiration. At Socialinsider, for example, we like to look at how Canva creates content.

Pro-tip: Three to five competitors per group gives you enough data to spot patterns without overwhelming the analysis.

3. Focus on the right competitor social media KPIs

Tracking too many numbers creates more confusion than insight, so choose the few that answer your question. Haley's top picks:

If I had to narrow it down to two or three social media KPIs, I would focus on engagement per impression, saves and shares, and video retention. These metrics reveal whether content is genuinely resonating with audiences and being supported by the algorithm. I find them far more insightful than things like total follower count or occasional viral posts.

Competitor analysis tools like Socialinsider let you compare these metrics side by side for multiple competitors in one dashboard, instead of checking profiles manually.

4. Normalize your data before making comparisons

Raw numbers mislead. As Haley put it:

A brand posting 60 times a month will almost always generate more total engagement than a similar brand posting 12 times a month. That doesn't automatically mean their content or strategy is better. They simply have more opportunities to accumulate engagement.

Level the playing field before you interpret anything:

• Compare engagement rate, not total engagement.
• Compare accounts of similar size and growth stage.
• Account for posting frequency, which Socialinsider shows for every profile.
• Use a long enough timeframe to tell whether a spike is a one-off viral post or a consistent pattern.

5. Look at their content pillars and top-performing content

Numbers tell you how competitors perform; their content tells you why. Look at the recurring content pillars each brand posts about and the engagement each one gets. One competitor may invest heavily in education while another focuses on trend commentary, and those differences point to opportunities you haven't explored.

Then review their top posts and best-performing formats. They often reveal what drives engagement: sometimes the format, sometimes the hook, sometimes the topic.

6. Look for patterns, not one-off wins

A single viral post rarely tells the full story. Consistent performance reveals far more useful social media competitor insights, so look for what repeats: formats that keep showing up in top posts, hooks or caption styles that reliably attract attention, recurring topics, and content series audiences recognize.

7. Adjust for content volume vs. performance

More posts don't mean better performance. A brand posting 20 times a month will naturally collect more likes than one posting eight times, so compare average engagement per post, and look for competitors winning with fewer, higher-quality posts. It shows whether success in your industry comes from publishing more or from publishing better.

8. Benchmark speed of experimentation

The fastest-growing brands don't just post consistently; they test constantly. Watch how quickly competitors adopt new formats and platform features, and how fast they adapt trends to their own voice. Haley explained why it matters:

I think speed of experimentation is a real competitive advantage on social media. Brands that test new formats early tend to gain traction faster because they learn what works before everyone else catches up. We saw this firsthand when we adopted TikTok early. Being willing to test, fail quickly, and iterate helped us grow one of the largest nonprofit followings on the platform.

Duolingo is a good example of this. Here's how it adapted a Bridgerton trend:

9. Track narrative arcs across posts

Some of the strongest social strategies are built around stories that unfold over time, not individual posts. Look at competitors' content over several weeks for weekly series, educational posts that build on each other, episodic storytelling and recurring themes. These keep audiences coming back for the next installment, and show you whether a competitor relies on standalone posts or builds momentum.

10. Build a consistent benchmarking system

Competitive benchmarking works best as a regular routine, not something you do once during a social media strategy review. Set up a dashboard with your key metrics, such as engagement rate, follower growth, posting frequency and top posts, and automate the data collection. Haley put it simply:

Any part of the process that involves raw data should be automated. No one on your team should be manually pulling numbers from different platforms. Automate the collection of data and metrics, then focus your effort on interpreting the results.

Helpful tools for competitor benchmarking

The right competitor benchmarking tool is one that pulls consistent data across platforms, maintains sufficient historical data to spot trends, and lets you analyze content at a sufficiently granular level to act on what you find. Without those three things, you'll spend more time wrestling with the data than learning from it.

What to look for in a competitor benchmarking tool

• Historical data depth. Looking only at the last 30 days is seriously limiting. You need at least 6-12 months of data to spot real seasonality, big shifts, and to get context for changes.
• Cross-platform coverage. Most brands now operate across four to six platforms, and a tool that covers Instagram well but treats TikTok or LinkedIn as an afterthought will leave gaps in your analysis. Look for consistent metric definitions and reporting across platforms.
• Content-level analysis. Aggregate numbers are as important as content-level data. Being able to drill into individual posts, group them into pillars, and compare engagement by format across competitors is where you’ll find your action points.

Native platform analytics vs. third-party tools — where each falls short

Native platform analytics and third-party tools serve different purposes.

Native analytics (Meta Insights, LinkedIn Page Analytics, TikTok Studio) provide accurate data for your own accounts. Where they fall short is competitor data: you can't see another brand's reach, engagement, or audience demographics through their native tools. You're limited to what's publicly visible, and you have to pull it manually for each competitor on each platform.

Third-party tools are built to close that gap. For example, Socialinsider is a social media analytics and competitive benchmarking platform that tracks competitor performance across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and X, used by social media leader to compare follower growth, engagement rate, reach, posting frequency, content pillar mix, and video views across multiple competitor accounts simultaneously.

Its core capabilities include:

• Cross-platform competitor tracking across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and Pinterest from a single workspace, with consistent metric definitions across every channel.
• Historical data so you can spot seasonality and long-term trends, rather than being stuck in a 30-day view.
• Custom benchmark groups that let you build separate views for direct, indirect, and aspirational competitors, and compare yourself against each set individually.
• Content pillar analysis that automatically groups posts into themes and shows which pillars are pulling the strongest engagement for each brand.
• Top post and format breakdowns to study the specific content driving outsized results across your competitor set.
• Industry benchmarks built from aggregated data, so you can compare your performance against category averages, not just your direct peer set.
• Exportable reports that turn the analysis into shareable deliverables for stakeholders.

Final thoughts

Competitive benchmarking only pays off when it leads to decisions. Clear questions, the right competitor set, layered metrics, and cross-channel interpretation will get you there. 

Repetition is also essential. Teams that benchmark on a steady cadence, translate findings into experiments, and refine their approach in each cycle are the ones making the most out of competitive benchmarking. 

Lastly, don’t be a data hero, collecting and curating everything manually. Nowadays, that’s a battle lost from the get-go. Leverage competitive benchmarking tools to get access to real insights. 

Frequently asked questions on competitive benchmarking

Why is competitive benchmarking important?

Competitive benchmarking is important because it gives you context for decisions. Judging your performance in a vacuum is misleading. A 5% growth in engagement feels like a win until you learn the category grew 10%. Through benchmarking, you learn how you’re performing, where you're falling behind, and which opportunities competitors haven't claimed yet.

How should benchmarking inform your content calendar, budget allocation, and channel strategy?

Benchmarking should shape each of these decisions differently:

• Content calendar: Use it to optimize content formats and themes. Saturated formats are a sign to differentiate or move on, while strong-performing pillars in the category point to gaps worth filling in your own social media content mix.
• Budget allocation: Concentrate resources where competitors get strong returns on modest effort, not where they're posting heavily, but engagement stays flat.
• Channel strategy: Benchmark each platform separately. Growth and engagement patterns vary widely, and the data tells you which channels are gaining traction in your category and which to deprioritize.

How many competitors should you benchmark against?

Five to ten in total is usually enough, split into groups of three to five direct, indirect and aspirational competitors. Fewer than three per group and the average isn't meaningful; more than ten and the analysis becomes hard to maintain. In a small niche, it's fine to work with fewer direct competitors and add audience-aligned accounts as a separate group.

How often should you run competitive benchmarking?

Monthly works well for fast-moving consumer categories, and quarterly is a good default for most brands, especially in B2B. Add a deeper semiannual or annual review to look at bigger shifts, such as competitors repositioning or audiences moving between platforms. Whatever cadence you choose, put it in the calendar so benchmarking doesn't only happen in reaction to a competitor's move.