With over 1.86 billion monthly active users Facebook is currently the market leader in terms of reach and scope. By 2021, the number of social network users worldwide is predicted to grow to 2.77 billion from 2.46 billion in 2017 or nearly 32.58 % of the projected global population by 2021. The below chart shows the average growth rate of social network users from 2010 to 2021.
Setting a SMART marketing objective is very important in managing a brand’s social presence. Among all metrics used, followers’ growth is considered one of the fundamental metrics in measuring the success of your digital and social marketing plans.
There is no right or wrong when it comes to followers’ growth rate for each industry. To enable your marketing team to correctly evaluate your brand presence, you need tp realize that proper brand presence doesn’t have one right metric, it all depends on the industry largely and then some trial and error.
You might not always have numbers on industry-wide averages, or even for your competitors. Trial and error works but first you need to start measuring the difference between your current and past followers numbers:
GROWTH RATE% = ((Current-PAST) /(PAST)) *100
In 2019, social networks will most likely bring in an additional 150M users on social networks. These users could potentially comment, share, follow, consume, create, or like your brands’ content or social accounts.
We chose the telecommunications industry in the Middle East as an example and analyzed the top 3 telecommunications in 5 selected GCC countries and Egypt. This following data covers monitoring Twitter and Facebook for 6 months and YouTube for 1 month. The following charts will analyze in-depth the growth rate of top telecommunications companies in the Middle East.
Graph A: Average followers’ growth rate per platform/month
Graph B: Average followers’ growth rate per country/month
Graph C: Average followers’ growth rate per brand
When we analyzed the telecommunications companies average followers’ growth rate to better understand the followers evolving opinions about platforms, countries, and brands we found that:
- Facebook followers’ growth rate is larger than Twitter by 3.9 %. (graph A)
- Oman comes first, UAE second, Bahrain, Egypt come third with the same percentage and KSA comes last. (graph B)
- Frenidi followers’ growth rate comes first larger than Mobily the last one by 9%. (graph c)
Choosing the right platform to use for your brand depends on which country you operate in and can remarkably affect how successful your marketing strategy is. That’s why we analyzed the average followers’ growth rate per platform in each country
Average followers’ growth rate per platform per country
By assigning a score to each of those telecommunications companies from 1-5 we found that Oman led the increase in followers’ growth rate followed by UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, KSA, and Kuwait came in last.
In order to understand the top countries and lowest performing brands in terms of followers growth we went for a second level analysis:
- Top 2 countries Oman, UAE per platform.
- The followers’ growth rate for Kuwait and KSA per companies on Twitter was negative so we went for a deeper dive.
How to Monitor Followers’ growth rate and why
Simply put, your followers’ number is NOT the only metric on which to measure whether you are doing social media marketing correctly. However, it cannot be overlooked. Measuring followers/ growth rate in real time is important in order to accurately determine the success of your social media activities.
Simply, use social listening to monitor your presence on social media (including real time followers’ growth) and for that matter, also monitor your competitors’ and key members of your industry of choice. Benchmark your progress and remember, everyone can tell when you are buying followers’. In Crowd Analyzer we always say 100 impactful followers are much more rewarding than a million fake ones.
Stay tuned to learn more on how to spot true influencers on your brand’s accounts and how to cultivate your relationship with them.
