How to Watch Your Competitors on Facebook
Facebook’s always changing and just might be the most frustrating social media platform out there! Since my last two 10-minute touch ups dived into analytics of two other platforms, I thought I’d highlight one cool little feature of Facebook Insights that’ll help you “spy” on what others are doing.
The 10-Minute Touch Up is a quick, weekly challenge to get you DOING, not just reading about doing. Consider it a way to touch up your blogging just 10 minutes at a time!
Challenge: Add Pages to Watch within your Facebook Insights, then visit their pages and study up!
Why: Because you can learn a lot from what others are doing. What to do, what NOT to do, and how they’re performing compared to you.
How to Do It
This only works if you have over 100 likes, so make sure you have that many first!
1. Head to your Facebook page, then click the Insights tab.
Scroll down past your recent posts and you’ll see “Pages to Watch.” There will already be some suggested pages, which may or may not be way off!
2. Click Add Pages and type in a keyword or page name.
While it won’t search by keyword, but it will find pages with that keyword in its name. For example, I typed in “social” and these popped up.
3. Determine Who to “Watch”
I picked a range of page sizes. In fact, pick at least one page that’s HUGELY successful and one that’s newer/smaller than you. That way you can see how you’re doing in relation to those.
Also, pick one from a completely different genre that you know is successful too. You can learn and apply what they do to your own page.
Choose at least five pages total, but the more you choose the more data you have to work from.
4. Analyze and Research
Facebook Insights doesn’t give you that much information, but it does give you a place to start
How often are other pages posting per week?
If a page is posting pretty frequently… How varied is the content? How often are they posting their own articles?
Do those who post more often have higher engagement?
If a page is getting a lot of engagement… Is it from a particular post that week? Or certain types of posts?
Who’s getting the most percentage increase in new likes?
If a page is getting a lot of likes… well there isn’t much you can tell from here, especially now you can’t like-gate content or make a Like a contest entry, but they might be doing Facebook ads. Plus, engagement – not likes – is what counts.
From there, click on the name of the page and a window will pop up with their top 20 posts of the past week (if they made that many).
With all of this info, jot down ideas on what you can post about and how you can improve.
For example, one page I follow has a big following and lots of engagement. So I took a look at her page. 99% of it consisted of quote images (and cheesy ones at that). While I have been wanting to do a few relevant quotes a month because I think they can be valuable and inspirational, I’m not willing to turn my page into a quote fest for some likes.
Likewise, kitten pictures are NOT okay if you aren’t blogging about kittens. They’ll give you engagement that isn’t benefitting your blog is any way. Darn kittens.
Your Turn
Run through the challenge. Learn anything interesting?
