I know not everyone is a fan of competition and if you are anything like me, it’s upsetting! Competing with your peers or inter-industry contacts can feel a bit out of line. When we are talking about ranking organically, this is a competition I feel you can use your competitor’s insights to your advantage. When we are looking at engagement and social signals, this is an easy place to gain some insight into what is working for your competitors that you could also benefit from.
I’m going to go over how to use your competitions Facebook to your advantage. I work with a lot of independent businesses and they often are fighting with captive businesses connections out ranking them. Gaining some Insight into what your local competitors are doing on social media and what sort of engagement or posts they are doing will help you gain an understanding of places for improvement.
Start off by thinking about why you want to track or keep tabs on your local competitors Facebook pages:
- What are your goals and objectives in comparing your local rivals?
- What are you looking to improve by keeping some tabs on your local competitors?
- Are you searching to gain more followers?
- Maybe more engagement on the posts you are uploading?
After you determine your goals then it’s time to think super basic. Check out this guide from Simply Measured for the basics.
- Is your business Facebook page optimized?
- Do you have all the information in the About section updated and current?
- Do you have reviews from customers on Facebook?
- Is your listing verified on https://www.facebook.com/services ?
- Do you have your company’s name for vanity URL?
- Is your “Call to action” button set up?
These are just the first steps to starting to get your Facebook business page all together. After you have things all set up, then it’s time to think about growing your audience and getting some posting strategy to gain engagement.
“Facebook Insights” is the native dashboard for Facebook analytics. Start this whole process by evaluating your business page before checking out the competiton. Obliviously this dashboard will show you the number of followers, likes and number of people that have been reached. All your engagement metrics will be here but what’s cool is that are the bottom you can add some local competitors to “Pages to watch”. This section on “Facebook Insights” will show you the number of total likes on the watch page, % change from last week to this week and then also the number of engagements (Reactions, comments and shares) during the week. Start by adding a few of your local competitors here first to get some basic information about your rivals.
Now that you have your goals for tracking your competitors and your Facebook Business page is all set up and you’ve went through “Pages to Watch” within “Facebook Insights” then you can start looking through your competitors content. What sort of things are they posting? What kind of content? Videos, Text, Images? Local events, community shares or unique content about the business? Then start accessing which pieces of content they are using are getting the most engagement. Use their strategy to your advantage. Generally posting with multimedia content on your social accounts is the best way to gain some engagement. Using some notes from your competitors is an easy way to get started.
Party on. Ambushed.
Ambushed Marketing 