Using Facebook's Pages to view Features - How Do You Discover How Your Competitors are Doing on Facebook

We all know that spending time working on social media can be very time consuming. But how great would it be if we could find a way to see what our competitors, the businesses that we admire, or other like-minded businesses are doing on their business Facebook pages. If we could see how and why these businesses are working so well, we could easily try to imitate and follow a similar strategy!

This can be done, using Facebook's Pages to Watch, which is hidden away in Facebook Insights!

Insights can be found at the top of your Facebook business page - you can use this tool to maximise your sharing/posting strategy. This data will help you to understand more clearly what works best for you, while avoiding the things that don’t. If you don't see Insights, click on More.

To find the Pages To Watch feature, you need to scroll down past Your 5 Most Recent Posts:

So what is so great about the Pages to Watch feature?

This feature is particularly useful if you want to see what types of posts are working for your competitors or other businesses like yours. 

You can see exactly what content they are posting, how often they are posting, and when they are posting. You can also view which posts have the most engagement.

With all that information, you can start looking at your own posts and analysing what you could do differently. When you use your insights information, you know which posts work best for you and which get the most reaction. When you learn this, you will be able to create more posts that mirror your successful posts. 

You should post videos occasionally, as they always seems to get more engagement. Or maybe you need to post more regularly? The great thing is that you can compare your activity against the pages that you are watching and you can see quickly if you efforts are working! 

You can watch any brand page on Facebook you want—you don’t even have to like the page. If you have 100 to 10,000 fans, you can create a list of up to 100 pages to watch. 

I would recommend you look at a minimum of five other pages to get started, the more you watch the more opportunities you will get to see what is making them more successful than you. 

The businesses you "watch" are in order of total Page likes, from highest to lowest. Depending on whose pages you view, your business is placed within that ranking to see how you compare with the rest - and oh boy does this kick-start your competitive drive!

If you've never used Insights, you should try to implement them into your daily social media activity, or at least make a goal to check them once a week. This tool is packed with tons of valuable information that will truly help your social media efforts! 

I expect you would like to know whose pages I watch... well, I'm not telling! ;) But, I do enjoy seeing how my renewed efforts are making my page more productive than those that I am following!

Happy Ballooning!

Sue Bowler
www.suebowler.com
#suebowler