Can you even remember the days before social media? Before engagement and baby announcements were shared on Facebook, dances on TikTok led to profitable careers, or an ordinary shopping trip was broadcast moment by moment on Instagram?
In February 2022, there were just over 47 billion total visits to social networks and online communities. Social media has become an integral part of our lives, and COVID-19 only cemented our need for digital networking sites that promote our careers, sense of connection, and community.
With endless opportunities at our fingertips, benchmarking your website performance against the industry standard and your closest competitors can help you amplify your presence online and become the next must-have trend.
There’s no better time than the present. Keep reading for five social media industry benchmarks to benefit your business. Plus, we dig deep into the performance metrics and analytics for the top social media apps trending today.
1. The top social sites
Before we dive into the specific metrics that you should be benchmarking against, let’s take a look at how the social networking industry is performing as a whole, including data on some of your strongest competitors.
Despite the impressive growth amid COVID-19, total visits to social networking sites are now beginning to slowly decline.
With face-to-face interactions canceled and in-person events postponed, the whole world turned to the internet for human connection. Between February 2020 and February 2021, the social media industry saw a 17.0% jump in total visits, rising from 41.0 billion to 47.9 billion.
However, with life slowly returning to “normal”, we’ve seen a slight decrease with 47.4 billion visits to social networks in February 2022: This is a 1.1% decrease year-over-year (YoY).
Even with this small decline, the industry retains its popularity. Here’s a current leaderboard of the top 10 social networks and communities worldwide:
- Facebook.com: 37.4% of traffic share, 18.8 billion monthly visits (in February 2022)
- Twitter.com: 13.0% of traffic share, 6.5 billion monthly visits
- Instagram.com: 12.0% of traffic share, 6.0 billion monthly visits
- Whatsapp.com: 5.3% of traffic share, 2.7 billion monthly visits
- Reddit.com: 3.1% of traffic share, 1.5 billion monthly visits
- Tiktok.com: 3.0% of traffic share, 1.5 billion monthly visits
- Linkedin.com: 2.8% of traffic share, 1.4 billion monthly visits
- Vk.com: 2.6% of traffic share, 1.3 billion monthly visits
- Discord.com: 2.5% of traffic share, 1.3 billion monthly visits
- Pinterest.com: 1.8% of traffic share, 885.7 million monthly visits
Now let’s take a look at how these top influencers’ traffic has changed YoY. How do your social media benchmarks compare?
It’s important to note that in the last month, four of the top 10 social media websites lost traffic share worldwide. This suggests that there is room in the market for smaller, more niche websites to win back some of the traffic share and draw more readers to their websites.
The five most popular social media websites in the United States differ slightly from the global standard. Facebook.com, twitter.com, and instagram.com are still in the top three spots, however, reddit.com comes in fourth in the U.S., followed by discord.com. Given that whatsapp.com is one of the most popular messaging apps outside of the United States, it makes sense that we don’t see it appear on the leaderboard here.
Facebook.com earned 3.4 billion monthly visits (37.1% of the traffic share) in the U.S. in February 2022. Its closest competitor, twitter.com earned 1.4 billion (14.8% of the traffic share).
2. Define your #followers
For social networks, defining your target audience is the key to success. Are most of the people coming to your website in their twenties? Are they predominantly identifying as male, female, or nonbinary? What about geography? In which regions are you the strongest and where do your competitors outperform?
These are all questions that benchmarking website performance and audience analysis can provide you.
For social networks and online communities, 10 countries make up approximately 53% of the market share for the top 100 websites, indicating that traffic to online communities is split equally across the world. Visitors in these countries account for approximately 37.5 billion total visits from December 2021 – February 2022.
Other audience demographics to track include age, gender, education, income, and more. How do these demographics impact engagement?
Males are more likely to visit social media networks than females (57% vs. 44%). And age distribution for this industry skews noticeably younger with 60% of the audience falling between 18–34 years old.
Now let’s turn to audience loyalty. With so many different options for sharing pictures, creating new content, and posting life updates, loyal and engaged users are key growth drivers for social media platforms. The more loyal your audience, the more likely they are to invite and tag their family and friends.
Benchmarking the stickiness of your website is one clear way to gauge audience loyalty. Website stickiness is calculated by dividing the average number of unique visitors by the average total monthly visits and is a good indicator of how loyal your fans are, and how likely they are to recommend you to others and keep coming back for more.
Top 100 websites in the category, February 2022, worldwide:
- Unique visitors (7.3 billion) / total visits (47.5 billion) x 100 = 15.4%
Top 25 websites in the category, June 2021, worldwide::
- Unique visitors (6.6 billion) / total visits (45.4 billion) x 100 = 14.5%
Top 10 websites in the category, June 2021, worldwide:
- Unique visitors (5.9 billion) / total visits (41.9 billion) x 100 = 14.1%
On average, social media websites have a stickiness level higher than 14%. Keep this benchmark in mind as you try to come up with new ways to convert new users into returning visitors.
3. Device split: it’s a #lifestyle choice
Are users tweeting from their phones or desktop more? And why does it matter?
Not only does this tell you about user preferences and lifestyle, but it also helps you optimize their experience (and keep them scrolling for longer).
Device distribution gives you important insight into your audience behavior and you can use this information to optimize your website accordingly. Maybe you’ll create a new sign-up flow just for mobile users or redesign your desktop website for a more seamless experience.
There is an almost even split between desktop and mobile web for social media websites, with mobile web having a slight advantage. This means that your users are likely accessing your website both from their phones and desktop and both versions should be fully optimized and analyzed regularly. Here are higher-level stats on the social media industry:
Top 10 websites in the category
- Desktop – 46.1% in 2022 (vs. 46.5% in 2021)
- Mobile Web – 53.9% in 2022 (vs. 53.5% in 2021)
Top 100 websites in the category:
- Desktop – 46.1% in 2022 (vs. 46.8% in 2021)
- Mobile Web – 53.9% in 2022 (vs. 53.2% in 2021)
4. Eliminate marketing channel FOMO
Figuring out how your followers are getting to your social media website is an important step in competitive benchmarking. You don’t want to be missing out on a chance to score traffic and page views simply because you don’t know which of your channels is performing well (or not well enough) compared to the industry.
Case in point, direct and organic search are the most influential marketing channels for driving traffic to social media websites, responsible for 75.8% and 16.3% of traffic share worldwide between December 2021– February 2022. This makes sense given that most of the social media platforms discussed in this blog are household names that people would just search for directly on their browsers.
Although these two marketing channels currently dominate, it means that there might be opportunities to draw traffic away from competitors in areas that are underutilized by the industry as a whole, for example, display ads or referrals.
The remaining traffic is split: email (1.2%), referrals (3.1%), social (3.5%), paid search (0.1%), and display ads (0.1%).
5. Keep ‘em clicking
Last on our list of social media benchmarks is user engagement rate. I don’t want to say that we saved the best for last, but measuring your visitors’ on-site engagement rates can tell you a lot about how you can improve user experience. Start by benchmarking your average session duration, pages per visit, click-through rate, and bounce rate to industry standards.
These metrics give you an idea of how engaged your visitors are with your platform. Are they browsing multiple pages and sharing the content they see? Maybe you’ll notice that one of your competitors stands out with a significantly lower bounce rate than the industry. See what they’re doing to keep users interested and try to implement the same into your strategy.
Tracking key engagement metrics can help you benchmark for success.
See how you compare to the engagement benchmarks for social media websites globally, as well as in the U.S. and the U.K. (December 2021 – February 2022)
Top 100 websites in the category globally, all traffic
- Monthly visits – 50.6 billion
- Average visit duration – 8 minutes 46 seconds
- Average pages per visit – 8.4
- Average bounce rate – 37.0%
Top 100 websites in the category in the U.S., all traffic
- Monthly visits – 9.6 billion
- Average visit duration – 8 minutes 29 seconds
- Average pages per visit – 8.0
- Average bounce rate – 37.3%
Top 100 websites in the category in the U.K., all traffic
- Monthly visits – 1.7 billion
- Average visit duration – 8 minutes 37 seconds
- Average pages per visit – 7.6
- Average bounce rate – 35.8
For a more granular view, take a look at how the top five social networks compare to the overall industry. Twitter.com has strong engagement metrics, with Instagram taking the lead in pages per visit. Whatsapp.com’s high bounce rate can be attributed to it being used primarily for communication unlike browsing, which is typical behavior in social media feeds.
There’s an app for that
Social media is almost synonymous with mobile apps. There’s literally an app for everything.
Because most of your competitors will also offer a mobile app version of their social media website, it’s important that you include benchmarking app data in any digital strategy. You can choose to benchmark the top industry leaders or your more niche competitors.
Take a look at our breakdown of the top mobile apps in Google Store’s Social category, including key performance indicators you should be measuring.
Not sure what you’re measuring? Here’s a summary of the app metrics analyzed:
- Install Penetration:The percentage of devices in the defined market with the app installed on average
- Downloads: App downloads from the Google Android Store in the given time period
- Unique Installs: Unique app installs during the given time period
- Daily Active Users: The average amount of unique daily active users
- Monthly Active Users: The average amount of unique monthly active users
Start slaying
How do your social media benchmarks compare? Benchmarking plays an integral role in helping you track your performance, identify areas for improvement, and ultimately secure better business opportunities.
For a deeper analysis of your position in the market, try Similarweb’s Research Intelligence free and enjoy access to real-time data and insights on-demand.
FAQ
What is social media benchmarking?
Social media benchmarking involves comparing your numbers and processes against industry standards.
One way to benchmark competitors on social media is by comparing the stickiness of your website to gauge audience loyalty.
by Molly Winik
Senior Content Marketing Manager
Molly has 8+ years of experience in marketing, content creation, and PR. Her work has been featured on Mention, The Times of Israel, and Culture Trip.
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