How to Use the Facebook Pages to Watch to Track Competitors

Why Pages to Watch

The Pages to Watch feature in Facebook Insights allows you to watch other Facebook pages so you can compare their activity, engagement and audience growth to your own.

Pages to Watch is particularly handy if you want to see what’s working for your competitors or similar niche pages. You can see exactly what content they’re posting, how often they’re posting and when they’re posting—and the resulting engagement. Armed with that information, you can tailor your own updates accordingly.

You can watch any brand page on Facebook you want—you don’t even have to like the page. If you have 100 to 10,000 fans, you can create a list of up to 100 pages to watch.

Most page admins won’t need to watch that many pages, but it’s nice to have one place to keep track of your top competitors or brands that inspire you.

How to Set Up Pages to Watch

To find the Pages to Watch feature, go Insights and click on Overview. Scroll down the page to the Add Pages section (it’s just below the Your 5 Most Recent Posts box).

Facebook Pages to Watch monitors other pages’ content.

To create your list, you have to choose at least five other pages to watch, but I recommend making a larger list. The more pages you watch, the easier it is to see trends (e.g., whether short text updates outperform updates with links).

To add new pages to your list, just click the blue Add Pages button and type the name of a new page in the search bar. Once you find the page you’re looking for,click Watch Page to add it to your list.

Add Pages to Watch to gain more insight.

If you can’t find the page you’re looking for, check the page’s name again. Some pages may change their name or have a different name from their parent company.

Facebook automatically suggests new pages for you based on your past choices. These appear both in your pop-up search window and on the original Insights page.

Suggested Pages to Watch finds pages for you.

If you want to follow any of the suggested pages, you should know that Facebook sends those pages a notification that they’ve been added to a watch list. However, the page will not know it’s you watching them.

If you want to get a broader sense of what your fans respond to, it’s helpful to find pages your current fans already like, even if those pages aren’t related to your niche. It’s an easy way to see what other kinds of content your fans are interested in seeing.

To find those pages, log into your personal profile. In the Graph Search box, type in “pages liked by people who like [your page name]”. The results show all of the other pages your audience has also liked.

Facebook Graph Search helps you find pages your audience likes.

Now you know what other brands are showing up in your audience’s news feed, and whom you’re competing against for their attention. Add them to your list to see how they compare to the niche pages you’re watching.

Graph Search may be more useful to pages with a large number of followers because it shows trends across your entire audience. If your page has a lower number of likes, your results may be less consistent because there aren’t enough fans to show trends.

Spot Tactic Trends

The best part about Pages to Watch is that it tells you exactly what kind of content works both on and off your page. If you see that your watched pages are having more success with images than links or videos, try using more images. If all the top posts have very little text, then focus more on one short message per post.

An important factor of increasing page activity is knowing when and how many times to post. Sure, there are a lot of studies and research that give you a basic idea, but does that advice really hold true for your page?

Follow the successes of other Pages to find trends you can use to adapt your own strategy. Image: Shutterstock.

The truth is that each page is different. Some pages’ audiences may be sufficiently active that they can post multiple times per day; whereas other pages may only want to post once a week to get the best results. You have to test and retest to see what works for you.

To help you along, watch how often other pages post and how it affects their engagement. What time of day are they posting? What time of day results in the most comments, likes and shares? Experiment with your own page and post at those times as well to see if it affects your own page’s engagement.

You’ll likely find that some pages are more useful for helping you spot content and engagement trends. Don’t be afraid to add and delete pages from your list as necessary.

Compare Engagement

The Insights Overview page shows you the high-level numbers (e.g., total likes, number of posts and engagement, etc.), but to see the specific posts that are doing well, you’ll need to dive a little deeper.

Go back to the top of your Insights page and click the Posts tab to the right of the Overview tab. On the Posts page click Top Posts from Pages You Watch.

Posts this Week shows you what content works best.

Now you can see the top five posts for that week from the list of pages you watch. Even though you may be following more than five pages, Facebook only delivers the top five posts that received the most engagement. That means you may see multiple posts from a single page and no results from another.

Facebook shows you the exact post, the date it was published and the engagement it received. Click on the text of the post to see the full update and how many likes, comments and shares it currently has.

The information is useful because you want to track the content that’s working, not the content that’s mediocre.

If five posts per week aren’t enough for you, you have another option. You can like other pages using Facebook as your page (instead of your personal profile) to see the full stream of their posts in real time through your page’s news feed.

To switch from your personal profile to your page profile, click the down arrow at the top right of the Facebook toolbar. Under Use Facebook As, choose the page you want to use to like the new page. Go to each page on your Pages to Watch list and like their page.

Facebook news feed works for pages too.

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How to Analyze Your Social Media Activities With Excel

Why Analyze?

No matter the size of your business, when it comes to social media you want to build two things: engagement and community.

To ensure that you deliver great content that resonates with your fans and followers, you need to track, test and measure the posts you put on your social networks.

It’s really that simple.

Here’s how:

#1: Build Your Spreadsheet

To begin, open Excel and create 14 columns that will contain the following categories to incorporate all of the information you need on your social media updates and posts:

• Date
• Network
• Categories
• Subcategories
• Target
• Calls to action
• Meta-tags
• Posts
• Impressions
• Comments (replies)
• Likes (favorites)
• Shares (retweets)
• Clicks
• Total engagement

An example spreadsheet (target, meta-tags, posts and impressions hidden).

The last four columns are where you store the engagement numbers for your content. Every network has three basic engagement actions: like, comment and share. Even on Instagram, which does not have a repost function built into it, there’s user behavior of reposting and tagging the original author.

Use this spreadsheet to store data and analyze your content.

#2: Identify Categories and Subcategories

You’ll need to decide on the information below and make a note of it before moving on to step #4 below where you fill in the spreadsheet.

Categories

Base your categories on the major topics of your posts and use them to identify major trends in content performance across each network. Examples of categories are:

• Product: Posts about major product categories.
• Holiday/seasonal: Posts with seasonal themes, which are especially helpful for e-commerce businesses.
• Third-party content: Posts with content from other websites such as news, articles and blog posts.

Create as many categories as you like, but keep them manageable and general. Save the specifics for subcategories.

Subcategories

Break down categories into smaller subcategories. This enables you to identify microtrends, as well as which pieces of content work the best and the worst. Based on the categories above, examples could include:

• Specific product names or features.
• Specific names of holidays or campaigns you’re running for a particular season.
• Specific website names from which you pull content or categories of topics for articles such as “humor,” “lifestyle” or “beauty.”

Subcategories can be as specific as you like, but keep them thematic. Each subcategory should have at least three posts; otherwise it may be too specific and better suited as a meta-tag (more on that later).

Keep your categories broad and use subcategories to drill down. Image Source: iStockPhoto.

#3: Outline Your Targets and Calls to Action

These two columns require the most forethought and a good understanding of your target market and business goals. You’ll need this information to fill out these columns on your spreadsheet.

Target

The target is whom you’re speaking to with your content. Your business may have multiple targets based on the people and decision-makers who engage with your content and purchase your products. For the sake of simplicity, we will use “male” and “female” as target examples.

However, I encourage you to spend time considering the different types of people in your audience and build context around those individuals to inform your content strategy.

Calls to Action

CTAs take many forms, depending on the individual goals of the post in each category. Just keep in mind that not all posts need CTAs and not all CTAs must be related to products.

Examples of CTAs include:

• Subscribe
• Visit website
• Buy now
• Share

Enter your calls to action to help you monitor your success.

Meta-tags

For a much deeper analysis on your types of content, you should use additional meta-tags to describe the individual elements of the content itself.

Keywords, image descriptions (such as person, object, colors, size or orientation) and even tone descriptors for the copy (such as humorous or excited) can be used as meta-tags.

These tags help isolate trends in creative content so you can select more engaging images and write more dynamic copy for your posts.

#4: Collect Your Data

Time to fill in your spreadsheet! There are a number of ways to do this, depending on the networks you use.

Below is an example of a spreadsheet for a retail company using the above-defined categories, subcategories, targets and meta-tags.

Populate your spreadsheet with post details.

There’s a lot of information to gather, but it’s all easy to find.

Twitter Analytics has an Export feature for your last 500 tweets, and Facebook Insights can be exported in 180-day chunks. Export regularly to make sure your data is current.

Use a tool like bit.ly to keep track of your link clicks. If you tend to post the same link multiple times, make sure you’re attributing your click to the right content by using tools like HootSuite‘s Click Report or BufferApp to track which specific posts generate the clicks. Each of these tools has free versions that allow you tomeasure posts on multiple networks.

#5: Sort Your Data

To identify your best-performing content across all of your networks, sort the Total Engagement column in descending order.

Sort by Total Engagement.

The best-performing posts in terms of engagement show at the top of the column.

After sorting by Total Engagement, your most successful posts show at the top of the spreadsheet.

To find the best-performing posts for specific social networks like Twitter or Instagram, filter first by Network, then by Total Engagement.

Filter your spreadsheet to find the posts with the highest engagement on each network.

#6: Analyze Categories

The next step is to manually filter for the categories and subcategories you’re interested in reviewing.

This spreadsheet is filtered to show only Product category posts.

Excel is very literal, so if you include more than one category or subcategory assigned to content, you’ll need to use the “contains” input in the Excel Filter feature, rather than selecting the check boxes. Use this setting to see the rows in the column that have multiple subcategories assigned, and those with just one.

Use the “contains” filter to show Product category posts that cross into multiple subcategories.

Once you identify the top posts in your categories, it’s time to analyze them for post copy, sentence structure and images (if applicable). What trends can help youoptimize content for each network?

Here are examples of three posts that promoted the same link.

A comparison of three posts promoting the same link shows that engagement was highest with men.

In this case, analysis shows that the shorter post lengths received more engagement. Among these similar posts about sweaters, the post using two different images generated a higher click-through rate with males than with females.

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6 Facebook Marketing Tips for Managing Your Facebook Page

#1: Check Your Wall-posting Preferences

Does your page get a lot of, ahem, critical commentary on its timeline? Or maybe just more than you have time to deal with easily? If so, it might be time to set your page’s Posting Ability tab so that only your page admins can post.

Here’s how: Choose Edit Page from your Admin panel. Then choose Edit Settings.

You can add/remove admins directly from the Admin panel.

From there, edit the Posting Ability tab and decide if you want everyone to be able to post on your page, or if you want to allow only your page admins to post.

You can adjust the posting ability to fit your page’s needs.

While I normally advocate allowing open access to a page, and even leaving negative posts up so your customers and future customers can see how you deal with criticism, for some businesses it’s just simpler to let people message you privately if they have an issue. Setting to “Posts by Page Only” also prevents Facebook users from spamming you.

You’re able to choose to allow everyone to post to your page or limit posting.

#2: Use Insights to Determine What’s Working for Your Page

There are two basic types of Facebook page admins: Those who post based on hunches as to what motivates engagement, and those who look at Facebook’s Insights to see what actually drives engagement.

Checking Facebook Insights will help you give your fans what they want. For example, if you notice that the posts with images have better reach and engagement than those that are text only, try removing the images to see what happens.

Since Facebook is always messing with EdgeRank, it can seem like just when you have figured out the formula for engagement, something changes. Checking Insights will help you stay on track, no matter what algorithmic changes Facebook throws your way.

A few months back, Facebook did a complete overhaul of Facebook Insights that walks you through the latest features.

Facebook Insights provide valuable information about the actions of your fans that can enhance your Facebook presence.

#3: Assign Admin Roles

Facebook allows five different administrator roles: manager, content creator, moderator, advertiser and insights analyst. Each role has different capabilities—only managers have the ability to change each admin’s role. Facebook makes all admins managers by default.

Each admin level has different capabilities for a Facebook page.

You can have as many admins on a page as you want. To add an admin, go to Edit Page on your timeline and then click Admin Roles. Scroll down and select Add Another Admin.

Note: To make someone an admin of your page, the person must have liked the page.

To prevent conflict among your employees and before you assign your Facebook page’s admin roles, establish some company-wide guidelines. Some things to consider:

• Have a quarterly Facebook training session. Discuss roles and address etiquette and expectations for employees who manage the page. At the quarterly meeting, discuss new Facebook features, address concerns about previous posts and talk about new tactics that you’d like to implement.
• Define the voice of your page. Each individual has a unique voice, but when representing a business or brand on a Facebook page, the page admins should work together to form a consistent voice. Make sure that your page admins understand the established voice and that they are expected to use that voice when communicating with users and fans online.
• Keep a shareable document (e.g., a Google doc) that outlines company social media policies. Employees should refer to the document at any time when they need to know what to post—and what not to post. This document should also include recommendations about how to interact with your Facebook fan base.
• Keep admins to a minimum. Don’t give just anyone admin rights to the Facebook page. The fewer people managing a page, the better. Two or three admins actively updating, responding to inquiries and managing the page are plenty.
• Keep communication between admins open. “If you’re not sure, ask!” is an elementary concept, yet it’s an important one. Whether responding to a particularly difficult user comment or sharing an article on the timeline, establish a rule of thumb that if any admin is unsure about whether something is appropriate, s/he should ask another admin for an opinion. Encouraging page admins to have open communication with one another will help reduce mistakes.

Adding new admins is easy as long as the person has liked your page.

#4: Choose Your Featured Likes 

Liking other business pages helps you build connections (and when they reciprocate, gives you added exposure), but you might not want certain pages to be among the first things visitors to your page see. Luckily, you can control which of the pages you’ve liked appear on your timeline.

Five of these likes are displayed at any one time, and the five that appear randomly change each time the visitor to your page refreshes—unless you edit which pages appear.

Why would you want to do this? You might want to feature pages that are related to your business. Or perhaps you want to feature pages that you think will be relevant to your readers. (If you pick more than five, they will rotate randomly.)

To choose featured likes, go to your Admin panel, choose Edit Page, then Edit Settings. Next, click More and then select Featured. From there you can edit your featured likes.

Try choosing featured pages that are relevant to your business that you think your fans would like.

#5: Bookmark Facebook’s Page Guidelines and Reacquaint Yourself With What’s Changed Recently

Facebook changes its terms of service…often. And unless you follow the company’s blog or frequently check their Page Guidelines, it can be difficult tokeep track of what’s allowed—or not—during a given month.

Of course reading social media blogs like Social Media Examiner will help you stay in the know, but page admins should still bookmark Facebook’s Page Guidelines and read the document at least once a quarter.

The constant changes of Facebook’s Page Guidelines require businesses to read and reference them often.

#6: Use Facebook as a Page Instead of as Yourself

Chances are if you’re the admin of a page, you simply head over to your business page and when you comment or post, you act as the business. But did you know that you can actually change your profile so that you are on Facebook as a page and not just as a personal profile acting as an admin on the page?

Why would you want to do this? If you happen to own or work for a B2B company, it’s a good way to build alliances with other businesses that are in your same industry (but aren’t competitors).

Let’s say you own a restaurant. You’d want to interact with hotels nearby so that when people check out the hotel’s page, they see your (positive and helpful) comments and are motivated to check out your business. Of course there’s a fine line—you don’t want to post too often or be so complimentary that your posts appear insincere, spammy or otherwise annoying. But posting as a page is a great way to network with similar businesses and leverage the marketing power of Facebook.

To act as a page on Facebook, click on the Settings icon in the top right corner of your Facebook profile and you’ll see an option to “Use Facebook as” with a list of the pages for which you’re an admin. When you choose to “Use Facebook as a Page,” you are able not only to post and comment as that page, but also your news feed contains the updates from the businesses your page follows instead of your personal friends and page likes.

Using Facebook as a page offers a variety of benefits to B2B companies.

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How to Know if Your Social Media Activities Are Working

Finding the Needles in the Haystack

As marketers, we’re on a mission to track and measure our efforts and their success.

We collect information on almost everything you can think of, from purchase history and demographics to psychographic data and everything in between.

The abundance of data has opened up a complicated web of options.

It’s important to know how to find the useful data that helps us make strategic decisions.

The following three tips will help you focus on what matters.

#1: Review the Posts Tab on Facebook Insights

Facebook has given marketers access to a ton of useful information with their Page Insights. Most people use this data to measure their success. We’re going to look at how to use it to refine your strategy.

Timing Your Posts

Start by going to your Facebook page and clicking on See Insights in the navigation bar at the top of the admin panel.

Facebook Insights are found in the admin panel of your page.

This takes you to the Overview page by default. Click on the Posts option in the Insights navigation bar. This will open up the When Your Fans Are Online insights.

This graph breaks down your fans’ Facebook usage by day and time.

This information is updated weekly and is great to use for adjusting your publishing schedule. Make sure you’re posting within 30 minutes of your users’ peak activity times. I recommend you test slightly prior to those times so that the post already has some engagement before the majority of your fans are online.

The next step is something a lot of people miss. Look at the vertical bars over each day of the week.

Use this section to find out which days of the week your fans are most active on.

Every audience has different habits. Sometimes one day of the week offers a 50-100% larger audience. These are opportunities you don’t want to overlook.

If you have days that stand out, plan on publishing important posts around them.

Next, check for the most active times for each day. The Post Insights page shows you the current day by default. Compare it to other days of the week by scrolling over them to see a line comparison of user activity.

There may be no big difference in activity times, but it always pays to check. I’ve had extremely successful posts come from opportunities I discovered by checking this data.

Compare the activity times for each day to find hidden engagement opportunities.

Now that you’ve got the timing down, let’s move on to your post formats.

Tracking Format Preferences

Over the past few years, there’s been a shift toward more visual content. Facebook fans were ignoring most link posts and going right for image or video posts, so many social media managers responded by focusing more on entertaining visual content to keep engagement up.

To combat the high amount of low-value visual content being published and push more valuable news feed content, Facebook now previews larger images for link posts. This has helped boost engagement for link posts while making it easier for managers to drive more traffic from the network to their websites and blogs.

While the new format levels the playing field for all post types, it’s extremely important to base your strategy on what your fans prefer.

In the Posts section of your Insights dashboard, next to When Your Fans Are Online,click on Post Types.

Insights shows you which types of posts generate the most engagement.

You’ll see a simple bar graph that shows you the average engagement for the different post types you’ve published on your page.

Just because one post type receives the highest amount of engagement doesn’t mean it’s the only post type you should be publishing. You should constantly test new tactics.

If you want to switch up your publishing style, test different post types and use this information to set a temporary post type mix.

This first section is pretty straightforward, but when you scroll down you see a chart of all of your recent page posts. Something a lot of people miss is the ability to sort all of these posts by the different metrics.

You an search your Facebook Insights to find out which posts had the most reach.

Depending on how social media works in your overall digital marketing strategy, you will want to look at different information; post reach versus post engagement, for example.

Sort your posts to reveal connections you may have missed. By going through your top-performing posts in the page’s entire history (relative to your strategy and KPIs), you can start to identify some qualitative factors you might not have thought about before.

Here’s a list of what to look for:

• Post content. Is there a visual or contextual theme that has consistently performed well over time? Maybe your fans have a soft spot for Star Wars references.
• Post copy. Are there sentence structures that consistently outperform others? Copy length, personality nuances and literary devices can be a factor.
• Visual themes. Is there something consistent in the imagery you’ve been using? Bright colors, 3D styling or photography might outperform illustration.

Use the information you gather from the Posts tab to serve up the content your fans want when they’re most likely to see it.

Use these tips to refine your Facebook strategy.

#2: Use Twitter Tools to Expand Reach

Although Twitter doesn’t directly offer insights, there are a couple of third-party tools I recommend checking out for different reasons.

Finding Influencers With TweetReach

While the breakdown TweetReach gives you for the estimated reach, exposure and impressions of your last 50 tweets is great for reporting, it’s nothing to act on strategically. The most valuable information here is the Contributors section.

The Contributors section shows you all of the users who contributed most to your reach during the last 50-tweet period.

Use TweetReach to easily identify people who broaden your reach.

Add these users to a Twitter list and monitor that list using a dashboard like TweetDeck. This helps remind you to reengage them on a regular basis. As this list grows and you increase your engagement with these users, you’ll see your engagement, reach and influence grow exponentially.

Ranking Engaging Tweets With Buffer

The new business accounts from Buffer let you sort your tweets/posts by the amount of engagement they receive (much like the Facebook Posts Insights above).

This gives you the same opportunity to scan through your top-performing tweets andbreak down all of the commonalities you may have missed.

I recommend going through at least your 50 top tweets to look for these things:

• Tweet content. Are links, videos or images more popular?
• Tweet structure. Where’s the link placed? Did you use hashtags?
• Tweet copy. What literary devices, personality nuances, etc., did you use?
• Twitter elements. How do you use mentions and hashtags?

Once you find some common themes, test their validity by sending out new tweets using the successful elements you discovered. Be sure to test one variable at a time to limit the assumptions you’re making.

Revealing Follower Activity With Followerwonk

The next tool I’ve recently grown fond of is Followerwonk. Use their Analyze Followers feature to discover the best times to send out your tweets.

Enter your Twitter username, and in the drop-down menu, be sure to change the option from Analyze Users They Follow to Analyze Their Followers. In just a few seconds, you see an hourly breakdown of your followers’ activity.

Note: As an added bonus, it’s easy to sync Followerwonk’s data with your Buffer schedule. Just click the orange button.

This bar graph instantly shows you how many of your followers are on Twitter during any hour of the day.

Use these three Twitter tools to build strategic relationships with influencers, optimize your updates and tweet according to when your followers are online, all of which will extend your overall reach.

#3: Optimize Your Pinterest Activity

Not that long ago, Pinterest rolled out a native analytics platform that focuses on the relationship between your website and Pinterest. While the data is useful and worth monitoring, it doesn’t really offer insights that can impact your strategy on the network itself.

PinReach, which was recently purchased by Tailwind, has a free version that offers a lot of value when it comes to delivering useful data.

Analyzing Pin Engagement 

Use the Pin Inspector feature to review your last 50 pins. Go through the same process you did with Facebook and Twitter to find the top-performing pins and uncover any consistent themes or styles you can identify in them.

Use PinReach to research the pins that get the most engagement.

Tracking Category Engagement

The Category Heatmap section shows a viral heatmap and an engagement heatmap. Both of these charts provide a strong visual breakdown of where you’re pinning versus where you receive the most engagement. Use this information to help you decide which categories you should focus your attention on and which aren’t worth your time.

Whatever you do, don’t pin content to those categories that aren’t producing relevant results. Instead, get creative with the content you’re producing and tie it to a category or theme that’s doing well. As always, test everything before making it a regular part of your strategy.

It’s easy to see which categories get the most play with the Category Heatmap on PinReach.

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