How to Monitor your Competitors with Facebook Tools

Did you know that you can see how many new likes your competitor got last week? What their most popular post was and see the adverts they are running??

Now let me add, that “monitoring your competitors” vs “obsessing and copying their every move” are 2 very different things. Just keep an eye on which one of these you are doing.

Pages To Watch

Facebook trialled this back in 2016, but in 2018 they have released a version which allows you to monitor up to 5 competitor Facebook pages without them knowing you are watching them.

What you can monitor:

• How many new likes they got last week
• How many times they posted last week
• What were the total engagement numbers from their posts last week (reactions, comments, shares)

How to set it up:

1. Visit your Facebook Page on a computer (no phones sorry!)
2. Click ‘Insights’ on the top menu
3. You should be on ‘Overview’ (left hand side menu)
4. Scroll to the bottom to ‘Pages to Watch’
5. Click ‘Add Pages’
6. Enter your competitors pages
7. Click Done

Top Posts from Pages You Watch

Once you’ve setup the Pages you would like to watch, you can also view their top posts. This allows you to see the type of content that is performing well within your industry, this is far more powerful that just monitoring how many likes your competitor got as you can use this information to craft your own content.

What you can monitor:

• The overall top 5 performing posts as a collective of all your competitor posts by engagement from the previous week
• The single top performing post of each competitor by engagement from the previous week

How to view the single top performing post by competitor:

1. See instructions above on how to setup ‘Pages to Watch’ – this must be done first
2. Go to your ‘Pages to Watch’ section
3. Click on the profile name of the competitor you would like to view
4. The best performing post (by engagement) will open up

How to view the overall top 5 posts by all your competitors (as a collective):

1. Under ‘Insights’ on the top menu, click ‘Posts’ (left hand side menu)
2. Across the top a second menu will show, click ‘Top Posts from Pages You Watch’
3. View the top posts by engagement

Active Facebook Advertising 

Facebook are trying to be more transparent so they recently launched this little beauty which allows you to see the adverts a Facebook business page is currently running.

Stalk your competitors in a whole new way, or check out what some larger companies are doing to bring in new clients or funnel their existing clients. This is great not to spy on your competitors, but to learn from the big boys and take some guess work out of your Facebook adverts.

What you can monitor:

• Their current active adverts
• What countries they are advertising to
• Advert variations being run for the different countries

How to view:

1. Visit the Facebook Business Page you would like to see on a computer (no phones sorry!)
2. On the businesses left hand menu click ‘Info and Ads’
3. View their active advertising
4. (some pages will have another option as the bottom to view other countries and a list will appear with the countries they are targeting and you can then view the individual ads for each)

Congrats you now have all the tools necessary to start stalking Facebook Business Pages, just remember to run your own race, but no harm in looking to what others are doing!

Nat