How every feature works
Getting started
What does Benchmark Socials actually do?
It reads the parts of social media that most reports skip. Your competitors' posts and what performed. The comments underneath, every one of them, in the language they were written in. The Reddit and Quora threads about your brand that nobody tagged you in. The Google reviews at each of your stores. Then it tells you what those things mean, not just how many there were.
Who is it for?
Social media managers who need to know what is working for a rival. Agency account managers who have to explain a number to a client. Brand and PR teams who want to hear a complaint before it spreads. Retail teams running many outlets. Talent managers negotiating what a creator is worth.
How do I get access?
Accounts are set up for you rather than opened by a signup form. Send us an enquiry with the brand you care about, and we will get you in and run your first scan with you.
Do you need my password, or a competitor's?
Never. Everything we read is public: posts, comments, threads and reviews that anyone could open in a browser. We never ask for a login to Instagram or any other platform, and we never store one.
Competitor Snapshot
What is a Competitor Snapshot?
Type a handle and we pull that account's recent posts, rank them by how they performed, and read the strongest and weakest to explain the difference. You come away knowing not just which post won, but what it had that the others did not.
Which platforms does it cover?
Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, YouTube Shorts, X and LinkedIn. Each scan reads up to forty recent posts, or twenty five on LinkedIn, and you can compare several competitors side by side.
Why does it ask what I am trying to achieve?
Because more views and more engagement lead to different advice from the same posts. A reel that reached two million people and drew a hundred comments is a triumph for reach and a warning for community. Telling us your goal is what turns a generic read into advice for you.
Can it tell whether a competitor's reach is bought or borrowed?
Yes. We split their posts into paid versus organic and solo versus collaborations, using the platform's own paid partnership and co author flags rather than guesswork, then compare them. You find out whether their reach is paid for, borrowed from a creator, or genuinely theirs.
How do I see a competitor's growth over time?
Your first scan of an account sets its baseline. Scan it again a day or more later and we measure the movement post by post, so a deeper second scan never masquerades as growth.
Store Reviews
What is Store Reviews?
Name your brand and the cities you trade in, and we find every outlet on Google Maps and read its reviews. You see each city's best and weakest branch, with their most recent reviews, and every branch links straight to its Maps page.
Why do you score the last ninety days separately?
Because a lifetime rating hides decline. A branch sitting on 4.5 across fourteen hundred reviews can be at 4.2 for the last three months, and only the recent number tells you something is going wrong. The gap between the two is the trend.
Why doesn't a store scan show Reddit and Quora any more?
They moved to the Reputation Loop, where every review site and the online conversation sit on one page. Store Reviews now does one job: every outlet in the cities you name, the weakest first.
Creator Valuation
What does Creator Valuation tell me?
What a creator's post is reasonably worth, before anyone negotiates. It works from both sides: a creator can justify a rate, and a brand can check a quote before paying it.
Why a range instead of one number?
Because one precise number would be pretending. You get a range and a confidence score out of a hundred, built from how many posts you gave us and how consistent they were. When the evidence is thin, the range widens instead of hiding it.
Can it spot bought followers?
It runs three independent checks on audience quality: engagement against the norm for that follower size, the ratio of comments to likes, and how consistent performance is across posts. Bought followers fail those in ways a follower count never reveals.
Is the estimate a market rate?
It is an estimate, and we say so. It is triangulated from published industry rate guides and your real engagement, niche and geography. Use it to anchor a conversation, not to replace one.
Competitive Ranking
What is Competitive Ranking?
A clear table of where you stand against your competitors on followers, posts, videos, engagement and views, one platform at a time.
Why one platform at a time?
Because Instagram views and Facebook likes are not the same thing. Mixing them into one table would produce a number that looks official and means nothing.
What if I do not know one of the numbers?
Leave it blank. A blank is left out of that ranking and shown as not reported, never counted as zero. Being unmeasured is not the same as losing, and a table that scores a blank as a zero is fiction presented as a measurement.
Accuracy and honesty
Which languages can you read?
Eleven: English, Hinglish, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi and Urdu. A complaint written in Tamil is counted as a complaint, not discarded as noise.
What happens when you cannot measure something?
You see that plainly, with the reason. We never fill a gap with a zero, because a zero is a finding, and a blank that pretends to be one is a finding nobody made.
Do you count spam and bots?
We flag them. Spam and promotional comments are one of the thirteen behaviours we sort into, so they are counted separately rather than inflating how many people liked your post.
Why might a number differ slightly from the app?
Because likes and comments keep arriving. We read a post at one moment, and the app shows it at another. The difference is usually a handful, and every report is timestamped so you know exactly when the reading was taken.
Reports and your data
Can I download a report?
Yes. Reports export to Excel, so you can take the numbers into your own deck or share them with a client.
How long are reports kept?
Reports are kept for seven days and then deleted automatically. Download anything you want to keep. We hold your data for as short a time as the work needs, not as long as we can.
What data do you keep about me?
Your account and the reports you run. We read only public information about the accounts you scan, and we never store a social media login, because we never ask for one.
Social Listening
Where do Reddit and Quora posts show up?
In the Reputation Loop, beside the review sites. It reads real Reddit threads and Quora answers about your brand, the posts themselves, and sorts them into concerns, questions about you and this week's talk. They have no stars, so they are never mixed into your ratings. If the exact name finds little, it widens the search and marks anything that doesn't name you as possibly related.
What does Sentiment Analysis read?
The comments on your posts or a competitor's, on Instagram, Facebook, X and YouTube. Give us a profile or links to specific posts and we sort every comment into one of thirteen behaviours: appreciation, complaint, criticism, question, humour, banter, sarcasm, celebration, excitement, attention seeking, niche mentions, spam, and neutral information.
Why thirteen behaviours instead of positive, negative and neutral?
Because a brand cannot act on a mood. Knowing that a tenth of your comments are people asking where to buy is something you can act on today. Knowing that one complaint is being written five different ways tells you it is one problem, not five.
Do you read comments that are only a GIF?
Yes. A GIF reply has no text, so tools that only read words count those people as silent. We identify the GIF itself and classify the reaction it expresses. On one Reel we checked, that was one comment in every twenty.
How many comments do you read on a post?
You choose the depth, up to several hundred comments per scan. Every report tells you how many comments the post really has and how many we read, so you always know what the sentiment was built on.
Why might my comment count differ from what Instagram shows?
Instagram's own counter includes comments that no outside tool can retrieve: deleted ones, ones hidden by the account's filters, and ones from private accounts. We read everything that is publicly retrievable and state the gap plainly rather than hiding it.