The team from @RivalIQ released their 2021 Social Media Benchmarks Report today. For years, it's been my go-to in the field.

The big story is the consistent decline of avg. engagement.

E.G. Instagram's median engagement rate in 2018 was 1.73%

In 2019, that falls to 1.60%, a drop of ~8%.

Keep in mind that Instagram has the *highest* avg engagement of networks in the report. For comparison, in 2019:
Facebook - 0.09%
Twitter - 0.045%

Yikes.

Last year, Instagram's average engagement falls almost 25%, to 1.22%. If your profile had 1,000 Instagram followers, on avg, you'd get ~12 likes/comments per post.

Twitter & Facebook stayed flat.

This year, the story's similar.

Facebook: 0.08% (down ~12%)
Twitter: 0.045% (flat)
Instagram: 0.98% (down ~20%)

These are across millions of posts on thousands of accounts across numerous industries, IMO a solid methodology.

A deeper look at Twitter:

Median engagement is 0.045%, steady over the last few years. But there's a good bit of variance by industry.

For example, "media" got ~1/4 of the average, while higher ed accounts did ~2X.

Maybe we've reached the floor of dropping engagement?

Another comparison I like: email open/click-through rates.

Via Mailchimp's Benchmarks ( https://mailchimp.com/resources/email-marketing-benchmarks/) we can see that email open & click rates have remained steady for almost 20 years!

Even better? Avg. open rate is ~250X higher than avg. social engagement rates.

I still believe social is a powerful way to reach people. It's a superb channel for growing reach, building relationships, and attracting right audiences.

But, every bit of work you do here should be designed to drive people back to either: A) your website or B) your email list.

Kindly, @RivalIQ makes the full report available free: http://rivaliq.com/blog/social-media-industry-benchmark-report/

I highly recommend getting the full version & comparing your accounts to your industry's averages. They also offer examples & tips for improved performance.