There are some big shifts in organic social engagement, especially on Facebook, according to the 2019 Social Media Industry Benchmark report from marketing intelligence company Rival IQ.

Instagram

Blair Feehan, content marketing manager at Rival IQ, discusses key findings: “First, Instagram continues to be a platform with lots of opportunity for social media marketers in 2019. The average engagement rates on Instagram stayed high, 1.6%, dropping less than 10% over the previous year. Those levels of engagement are certainly driven by the high organic reach we continue to see on Instagram posts. And, with the average brand posting only five times a week, there’s still room for everyone to grow here.

Twitter

“Second, like on Instagram, the average engagement on Twitter stayed relatively constant when compared with the previous year. Though the engagement rate is seemingly low at 0.048% per post, it’s important for brands not to write off Twitter because of that one statistic. There is still a great opportunity for brands to listen and engage one-to-one with users, and a small but engaged Twitter audience can still provide meaningful results for business. Also, Twitter-based customer service, when done well, can create a positive experience for customers.”

Facebook

Last, Feehan concludes by discussing how Facebook is failing to engage as much as it used to: “Whilst Instagram and Twitter maintained their engagement performance, average engagement on Facebook declined substantially from our previous year’s report. The continued decline of organic reach for brands on Facebook has definitely impacted engagement – it’s hard to engage with content you never see. Still, photo and video posts dramatically outpace link posts. Brands that want to earn reach on Facebook will either need to refocus their energy on maximising on-platform content or spend money to acquire it.”

Methodology

For the third year in a row, Rival IQ has put together a guide to social media benchmarking from thousands of companies across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, analysing engagement rates, posting frequency, post types, and hashtags.

The study defines engagement as measurable interaction on social media posts, including likes, comments, favourites, retweets, shares, and reactions. Engagement rate is calculated based on all these interactions divided by total follower count.

There is a representative sample of national and international companies in each industry by selecting 150 companies at random from each industry from a database of over 150,000 companies. The 2019 industries included:

• Alcohol
• Fashion
• Food & Beverage
• Health & Beauty
• Higher Education
• Home Decor
• Hotels & Resorts
• Influencers
• Media
• Nonprofits
• Retail
• Sports Teams

Companies selected had active presences on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as of January 2018, and had Facebook fan counts between 25,000 and 1 million as of the same date.