Strategically benchmarking competitors for WBCSD

WBCSD – World Business Council for Sustainable Development – wanted to gain insights into what certain peer organisations were doing well, and not so well, across social media marketing, so that they could use these learnings and insights to strategically position their own social media activity.

Empower previously used its partner tools, including Brandwatch (formerly Falcon.io), to complete an initial benchmarking project for WBCSD in 2022, and then again in 2023, to update the learnings and insights. As such, WBCSD tasked Empower with an additional benchmarking project that was relevant in 2024.

This piece of work brought along some unique challenges with it. Firstly, WBCSD’s primary social network is LinkedIn, and the platform’s closed API meant that obtaining key partner data for LinkedIn was a more manual process than it might have been for other platforms. Likewise, although X (Twitter) has an open API, the timing of this project coincided with an overhaul of X Analytics, meaning that strategic data was harder to obtain on this occasion than it was in the past.

Finally, we did not have access to competitors’ internal data with regard to their content, and so this meant that we were unable to access their true (internal) engagement rates for specific posts.

Social media benchmarking looks at key performance indicators of competitors to see how you stack up against them and pave an informed way forward.

We used partner tools like Brandwatch to carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the 10 competitors provided alongside a deep dive into WBCSD’s social media channels. Where relevant, we cross-compared findings from this project against those within the previous benchmarking project carried out in 2023.

To overcome the challenge of not having access to competitors’ true engagement rates, we provided external engagement rates based on the data that we could obtain.