What You Can Learn from Facebook’s “Pages to Watch”
The Sprocket Report
We strongly encourage you to measure your social media results to learn how to improve your marketing. And measuring your competitors’ results can teach you even more! With Facebook’s “Pages to Watch,” you can do just that.
Unlike a personal page, a Facebook Business Page provides Insights which measures your efforts. But did you know that you can measure your competitors on Insights as well? You’ll find less information than you get from your own page, but it’s still useful data that can help you be a better social media marketer.
If your Business Page is brand new, you won’t be able to access Insights until you have 30 Followers, but once you hit that level, you’ll see reports like when your audience is usually on Facebook and which of your posts is getting the most engagement.
The Pages to Watch feature is even more exclusive – you’ll need to log 100 Followers before you get that access. To use Pages to Watch, click on the Insights tab on your page’s navigation menu which will take you to the Overview page and then scroll to the bottom. It’s the last report on the Overview page.
Facebook will suggest comparable pages that you might want to watch and you can choose which ones you want to compare to your own. Don’t worry -- they won’t know that it’s you who is watching them. Facebook will order them from the most Likes to the least so you can see where you fit on the list.
In addition to the total number of page Likes, you will see
- Percentage change of number of Likes from last week
- The number of posts this week and
- The rate of engagement on posts this week
You may be shocked at the number of Likes some pages have – particularly if it’s a local competitor that you already know fairly well. If they have thousands of Likes compared to your hundreds of Likes, it’s possible that your competitor bought those.
Some marketing advisors suggest buying Likes because it makes your page look more successful, but a fake audience acts fake. They don’t engage online and they will never be your customers. They also mess up your Insights data. You can roughly deduce how much of a competitor's audience is fake by looking at their Engagement rate. For instance, take a look at this comparison chart:
The number of Likes each of these five pages has varies wildly, from 3,000 to just 142. If you compare the page that has 2.1K Likes with the page that has 142 Likes, you can see that they each wrote 12 posts last week. 18 people engaged with the posts on the 142 Like page while only a single person engaged out of the 2.1K Likes the other page has. Chances are good, many of those Likes are not real followers.
To really compare, figure the percentage of followers who engage to see how you measure up to your competitor. (If math is not your strong suit, use this online calculator.) The page with 142 followers has a 12.7% engagement rate while the page with 2.1K followers has a mere .05% engagement rate. If you’re trying to build brand recognition and an online community of potential customers, engagement rate is all-important.
In addition to comparing numbers, you can click on each page you are watching and see their posts from last week in order of engagement rate. Check to see what kind of posts are working well for them. Are the most popular posts photos? Videos? Original content? Trending news? Now you can experiment with your own posts and see if it works for you, too!
Never before have businesses been able to track their marketing efforts like we can today. That means you can save yourself dollars and headaches by making educated decisions instead of blindly throwing out content and hoping for the best. Whether you want to hand the social media marketing part of your business over completely or if you just want an hour or two of expert guidance to do it yourself, Sprocket websites is happy to be your partner. Call us today.
Kate Gingold
I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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