How many of you bother to truly engage with the social media you follow? Sure, many of us will scroll through feeds, but how many of us get involved or are grabbed by the posts that we receive?
Engagement is a key measure of how well your social media platform can grab the attention of others. It is the metric that records clicks, likes, comments and shares.
While impressions, i.e. the number of users that see a post, are important for assessing the reach of your content it doesn’t necessarily tell you how it is viewed or valued – engagement does.
In recent years, much value has been placed on the idea of the “attention economy”. This idea states that one of the scarcest commodities is our time and attention.
There is an often-quoted stat that suggests the average attention span is now just eight seconds – less than a goldfish.
However, subsequent investigation by BBC and another study by King’s College London suggest that when it comes to attention, things are often more nuanced and often dependent on the task at hand.
For example, more recent studies of Gen Z by Yahoo! suggest that their digital attention span may be as short as 1.3 seconds! This is supposedly being driven by shorter format content, such as TikToks and Instagram Reels.
Benchmarking the professional services industry
While the accounting and legal sector might not exclusively target the shorter attention spans of Gen Z it is interesting to see what “good” or “average” looks like when it comes to engagement.
Thankfully, the social media management platform Hootsuite has recently released its latest benchmarking report so that firms can see how they compare to the wider industry.
For Professional services and consulting it states that the current rates are:
- Average Instagram engagement rate: 1.63%
- Average Facebook engagement rate: 1.03%
- Average X (Twitter) engagement rate: 0.97%
- Average LinkedIn engagement rate: 1.61%
These rates may seem incredibly low to some, but the reality is that it is getting more challenging to get social media users to invest their time and attention to content in what is an increasingly busy and ever-changing digital environment.
How well do we compare?
As an agency that manages the social media accounts of a wide range of accountancy and legal firms across the UK, this latest insight from Hootsuite has helped us to understand how well our content performs.
According to our analysis using Hootsuite’s tools, our average client currently enjoys:
- Average Instagram engagement rate: 8.22%
- Average Facebook engagement rate: 4.88%
- Average X (Twitter) engagement rate: 4.73%
- Average LinkedIn engagement rate: 5.19%
While we are rightly proud of producing content that is often 4 – 5 times better than average you can never be complacent when it comes to social media as trends continue to change platforms evolve.
How you can improve engagement
Social media is constantly in flux and changing, so it is important that your strategies and approach adapt as well.
Looking ahead to 2024 there are some key trends that we think all firms and brands should focus on to improve engagement:
- Greater focus on thought leadership and insight above information alone
- Inject personality and build a personal brand to create deeper connections
- Shorter, smarter, stronger – messaging needs to be intelligent and drive behaviour so, be bold.
- Don’t ignore mixed media, especially videos.
We don’t want to give all of our secrets away for nothing, so if you would like a social media strategy that helps to drive engagement across your platforms speak to our team today.
