How to Watch Your Competition on Facebook

Are your competitors on Facebook? Do they have an established following yet? Are they getting massive reach and engagement? Well, then it’s time for you to understand what they are doing that you are not. It can be very insightful to monitor your competitors on Facebook and study what’s working for them and what not.

We do not advocate that you should go ahead and copy their posts. But you also don’t need to invent the wheel! By monitoring your competition on Facebook you get ideas on how to tweak your own posting strategy to build on what’s working for someone else.

Let us teach you how you keep an eye on your competition using native Facebook features:

Set Up Facebook Pages to Watch

In your settings section of your Facebook Fanpage you have the option to monitor your competitors’ Facebook Fanpages directly. This functionality is absolutely underutilised although it is the easiest way to keep up with what your competition is doing. You competitors won’t see that your are watching them. They will receive only a notification that ‘someone’ is watching them.

To set up this function go to the overview section of your Facebook Insights and scroll down to ‘Pages to Watch’. Facebook will automatically suggest pages to watch based on the categories you have chosen for your own page. Search for the pages you already know get a lot of engagement and select pages to watch. You can add up to 100 pages in total.

How to watch your competition on Facebook

Check on your competition regularly

It is advisable that you check your competitor’s activities regularly and take note of how many times per day they are posting and what type of content works best for them. You can click on each page and you will be shown the top posts of the last week.

Research competition on Facebook

In a next step, you can go to the Posts section of your Insights, and click on the ‘Top Posts from Pages You Watch’. This will bring up the top 5 performing posts across all the pages you are monitoring.

How to watch your competition on Facebook

You can dig a little deeper into the engagement type if you like to by clicking on the posts itself. You will be shown the likes, shares and comments which will give you an indication of what works best. Adapt the best posts to your own strategy. There is nothing wrong with re-posting the same or similar content if you know it will be of interest to your target audience.

 

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