Work Wednesday: Stalk your competitors on Facebook

If you know what your competitors are doing when it comes to social media marketing, it's easier to formulate a plan of action for your own online marketing strategy. Facebook offers up a fantastic tool that we like to use: Pages to Watch. Pages to Watch is incredibly easy to use and it offers you fantastic insight into where your competitors are positioned on Facebook. The way we often approach this is by opening up Google and searching for keywords that we want to compete for in the search rankings. We usually select 3 different keywords, perform individual searches and select 2 or 3 of the top ranking websites (these are usually competitors). From this, we are able to construct a list of a few of the companies that we want to compete against, and on top of that we add a few companies that aren't necessarily competitors but we know they're doing a fantastic job on Facebook. For us the outcome is something along these lines: There are some great insights available:

1. See your competitors growth.
2. How often are your competitors posting?
3. What is their engagement score?
4. Share notifications.

These 4 features alone are a great reason to get your Pages to Watch set up and tracking if you want to be serious about social media. Of course, you need to take these 4 features and use them to your benefit which will mean watching closely, looking for similarities amongst your competitors and so forth. A really useful feature is that you're able to click on the competitors name and Facebook will present you with a popup showing the competitors most popular posts for the week. This allows you to quickly and easily click through the pages you're tracking and see what is most popular. To access Pages to Watch just log into your Facebook account, click through to your page and locate the Insights tab. On the Overview page, scroll down and look for the "Add Pages" button.