By Ian Marker, Account Associate
Working in an award-winning marketing agency in Cincinnati, you learn what it takes to measure up your clients’ competitors. It’s our job to make sure they have the best content that earns the most engagement for their audience. In return, the client receives more engagement for their website and more sales of their product or service. But how do you know where your social media stands without having an agency like us complete a full (and very useful) competitive audit?
When it comes down to it, there are only two factors you can control when making social media posts: creativity of content and the frequency of the content. From there, it’s all a game of optimizing those two factors to maximize engagement on your business page. The hard part is trying to track down those trends and successes to optimize your posts.
Facebook includes a small but powerful tool inside their Insights tab to help you size up your competition. Head over to your Facebook Business page and click on the Insights tab. Under the Overview section, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and you’ll see the Pages to Watch widget.
The example below shows a sample of pages to watch. These pages aren’t direct business competitors, but that’s okay. As a benchmark for your page you may want to compare yourself to pages that are good at posting social content as well as your researched competitors.
When you begin to set the feature up, you will see your own page and be prompted to add pages you’d like to keep tabs on. Once selected, it will rank in order of page likes so you can tell where your page lands. The other key metrics this tool shows you is how often you and your competitors post, and their engagement level. You can use these tools to see how different posting strategies change engagement. Perhaps most important is to see how posting consistently keeps an audience engaged.
Comparing yourself to your competitors’ pages shouldn’t be the only factor in your social media evaluation, as each audience you’ve worked hard to gain is different and likes your page for a reason. Using this tool does give you a quick snapshot of where you stack up and where to set your Facebook goals for the future! Curious about how you can further improve your social media presence? Shoot us an email. We love this stuff!