Which industries perform best on social, and on what platforms are they seeing the most significant growth?
These can be key questions when formulating your own strategy - while you can't necessarily compare your business to others straight up, looking at what's working in each sector can give you a baseline, while also pointing you to the platforms where others in your market are seeing the best results.
To help with this, TrackMaven recently conducted a study, examining 12 months worth of social data from over 700 leading businesses. They've segmented the results into industry sectors, providing more granular data on each - here's a summary of their key findings.
Social Audience
As you might expect, TrackMaven's data showed that sports and entertainment brands are the most followed on social, but it's interesting to note the platforms on which they're seeing the most fans, and where other sectors rank in comparison.
Facebook is clearly prominent in each line, though Instagram is also a key platform in many sectors.
TrackMaven also notes that businesses in the media and publishing industry have the best representation across multiple channels, while their data also shows that B2B industries (finance, business services, construction products) all have strong presences on LinkedIn - which is a little more difficult to see in the chart.
Engagement and Interaction
But more important than raw follower counts, TrackMaven's also logged social interactions by industry, finding that consumer goods brands see the most engagement per post, on average, with particularly good performance on Instagram.
Instagram engagement actually stands out in almost all sectors, which TrackMaven highlights in their accompanying notes:
"The average brands in 12 out of 13 industries in this analysis see the highest engagement ratio on Instagram.The one exception is the real estate industry, which sees the highest engagement ratio on LinkedIn. Brands in the finance and insurance industry have the highest average engagement ratio on Instagram overall, with 96.17 average interactions per post per 1,000 followers."
Despite Instagram introducing business-focussed tools, and upping their ad options, there's no sign, based on this report, that consumer enthusiasm for the platform is slowing down just yet.
TrackMaven also notes that brands saw significantly lower engagement, overall, on Twitter.
Sector Breakdowns
In addition to the more generic trends, TrackMaven has also broken each sector down with its own specific page of insights within the report.
This provides a great reference point for those considering how to maximize their social media marketing efforts.
Overall, the data provides some great insights. Much of it is what you might expect, but as with previous TrackMaven reports, it's the specific industry breakdowns that provide real value, as you can better cross-check your own performance and strategy against what others in your market are seeing.
You can check out the full TrackMaven '2017 Digital Marketing Analytics Performance Report' here.