Social Media engagement remains steady on Instagram for marketers: SocialInsider study.

Marketers may want to stay away from Twitter and Facebook, which are yielding low engagement rates.

A recent report by Socialinsider, “2021 Social Media Industry Benchmarks” report, showed that companies are yielding an average engagement rate of just 0.07% on Twitter as of 2020 whereas Facebook had an average engagement rate per post of only 0.27%.

In contrast, Instagram has emerged as the top dog in this space, offering an average engagement rate of 1.16%, suggesting that this may be the best outlet for marketers across the board.  

In 2020, brands chose to post 36% more content on Twitter compared with Instagram and Facebook, the report noted.   

According to the study, compared to 2019, most verticals have decided to publish more content on Facebook and Twitter, while on Instagram, the scales are more or less the same.   On Facebook, significant increases in posting frequency can be seen in the magazine-journal pages, press agencies, and sports-media pages. “Safe to say, pages with an informative nature, all related to media and journalism, have chosen to increase their Facebook posting frequency in 2020,” the report highlighted.

The report is based on the analysis of “over 22 million posts on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter from 35 industries”.  Socialinsider created a comparison between the social media performance of 2019 and 2020.

The key insights of the report are as follows:

  • The trending platform of the moment, Instagram, seems to be the place where brands are getting a small increase in engagement. Overall, the average engagement rate for brands on Instagram increased in 2020 by 6.39%, from 1.09% in 2019 to 1.16% in 2020.  
  • On Facebook everything is about ads. The engagement stayed flat (compared with 2019), and brands merely reached out a median engagement of 0.27%.
  • Twitter is almost dead for all industries. Everything you post as a brand on Twitter brings you an engagement of 0.07% unless you are a politician where you can reach out 0.45% engagement.
  • All 35 industries publish images as the primary type of social media content: 84.16% photos on Instagram, 75.14% photos on Facebook, and 52.86% images on Twitter.
  • Across all industries, in 2020, brands chose to post 36% more content on Twitter compared with Instagram and Facebook.
  • On the Instagram feed, the posting frequency declined by about 6.22% in 2020, and these brands focused their content efforts on Stories too.
  • The average Facebook posts per day across all sectors increased by about 6.40% in 2020.
  • The politics, education, and airline brands are the most successful profiles on Instagram, with the highest average engagement rates out of all industries.
  • On Twitter, the politics industry generates more conversations with an average engagement rate of 0.45%, followed by the conglomerate, restaurant-cafe, and sports media industries.