Still wondering if TikTok is worth your brand's attention? The latest Rival IQ report reveals the platform's impressive growth and continued user engagement, making it a prime target for social media strategies in 2024.
We’re jumping into the key points from their report and how you can use them to analyze your own TikTok metrics.
Benchmarking is a part of the analytics process that compares your social media results to industry and competitor standards. How do your campaign results - like engagements, engagement rate, clicks, and more - hold up against other brands’ campaigns on the same channel?
Benchmarking is a key component of strategy. Understanding how your brand stacks up against competitors and industry leaders on TikTok can be useful for optimizing content strategy, setting realistic goals and expectations, and identifying areas for improvement.
Many benchmarking reports emphasize the importance of analyzing your own data alongside industry benchmarks. This allows you to track your progress and measure the effectiveness of your specific social media strategy.
Recently, Rival IQ released their 2024 TikTok Benchmark Report, analyzing key metrics commonly observed across many of today's social media platforms. Some of these key benchmarks, such as engagement rate, are frequently used as key performance indicators (KPIs) for many brands.
To better understand the one way intersection between metrics and KPIs, or to have a baseline understanding of reading benchmark reports, check out this blog!
In this 2024 iteration of the TikTok Benchmark Report, the following metrics are assessed:
Knowing that engagement rate is one of the most important metrics to track - more on that later - here are the industry benchmarks for engagement rate by view.
Sports Teams: 9.2%
Nonprofits: 5.2%
Influencers: 4.9%
Alcohol: 4.3%
Higher Education: 4.1%
Media: 3.8%
Travel: 3.0%
Tech & Software: 2.9%
Fashion: 2.7%
Health & Beauty: 2.7%
Retail: 2.6%
Food & Beverage: 2.6%
Home Decor: 2.5%
Financial Services: 1.9%
You can check out the full list of benchmarks in the report here.
After considering this long list of metrics, brands should evaluate which ones are most suitable as KPIs to fulfill their overall TikTok strategies.
Rival IQ emphasizes engagement rate - a metric used to measure how much a social media audience interacts with a piece of content - as one of the most prevalent metrics for them when benchmarking brands across many industries. Engagement rate is a versatile KPI, ideal for brands with diverse objectives like boosting brand affinity, awareness, and even sales conversions.
TikTok is a highly engaged platform in general, so it is also important to understand the context of how this percentage is shifting non-linearly when it comes to both engagement rate by followers and engagement rate by views.
The data shown in Rival IQ’s articles suggests that engagement rate by follower count skews higher for accounts with smaller follower buckets, left-skewed distribution in statistics terms. As Rival IQ suggests, high-follower accounts might have a lower average views per follower compared to smaller accounts.
This means a smaller portion of their total followers actually see their content (due to the algorithm or other factors). This can also be attributed from basic mathematical effects: if engagement is still happening (likes, comments, shares) but on a smaller subset of viewers (lower views per follower), the engagement rate per follower will naturally be lower since the denominator (total followers) is much larger.
Many brands might be tempted to prioritize follower growth as their main KPI, but in reality, we often categorize this as a primary vanity metric. A vanity metric is a statistic that looks impressive at first glance but doesn't necessarily translate to any meaningful business results when observed in isolation.
We typically observe follower growth as a byproduct of high engagement across many different platforms, and TikTok definitely follows that trend.
Track follower growth as a secondary metric, as a strong correlation often exists between the two.
This allows you to focus on creating high-quality content that fosters engagement, which will likely lead to organic follower growth over time. This can further trickle down to utilizing the other metrics such as videos per week, hashtags per video, and videos with mentions, which can also contribute to overall optimization strategies.
Newly arriving brands into the platform, or newer accounts in general, may want to consider engagement rates per view over followers because of the mathematical inflation that is likely to occur when adding follower counts into the mix. A high engagement rate by followers with a very small audience might not be a true reflection of your content's overall effectiveness. It simply means a small group of followers is highly engaged, but it doesn't necessarily indicate broad appeal.
As your follower base grows, you can start tracking both engagement rate by view and engagement rate by follower. This provides a more balanced view of your content's effectiveness. You can also start comparing your engagement rate by follower to industry averages - but it is also important to consider research on follower buckets for accounts as we have discussed the impact of follower counts on these percentages.
As a disclaimer, nothing will outweigh the importance of leveraging your own benchmarks. Industry reports offer a starting point and can help you understand your performance on a broader TikTok landscape. Focusing solely on industry benchmarks can be discouraging if your numbers fall short initially. Tracking your own progress allows you to celebrate improvements and measure your success based on your own growth trajectory.
Want us to bring both personalized and industry benchmarking into your brand? Send us a message!
