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 Drive More Facebook Traffic to Your Website in 5 Easy Steps

Getting Facebook fans to your website (and then hopefully onto your email list) is even more critical with Facebook’s recent announcement of decreased organic reach for pages.

Use these five steps to help you get more traffic Facebook to your website.

#1: Make Sure You Have a Steady Stream of Shareable Content on Your Website

If you have a website that never changes, you’re going to struggle to get much traffic to it. Posting links to the same page on your site over and over is as futile as Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill.

These days, the name of the game is content marketing and you had better figure out how your business can participate.

The fresh, new content you post on your site is important—not only for social media marketing, but also for search engine optimization. Google rewards sites featuring fresh content with higher ranking. But you don’t have to post epic blog articles three times a week to win at the content marketing game. Posting something new and helpful once a week or even once a month can benefit your website traffic.

Here are some ideas that can help you brainstorm how you can add new content to your website:

• Post a weekly tip about your niche. It doesn’t have to be long; a paragraph or two with a nice photo will do just fine. Start with the frequently asked questions that come in from your customers.
• Post a weekly news bite with a photo about what is happening in your business. This works well for businesses that have events.
• Curate a list of top 10 helpful articles from around the web that you found that week. Add a short sentence about why you liked them.
• Interview someone in your office or in your industry. The interview doesn’t have to be live or with video (but that makes it even better). You could send the interviewee a list of 5-10 questions beforehand.

Roth Heating & Cooling posts quick tips that benefit their audience.

Not only will you increase the keywords on your site (which benefits you on search engines), you can use this material for social media postings and in your email newsletter. A win-win-win!

#2: Make it Easy to Share Your Content to Facebook on Your Website

Once you have fresh content, you need to make it shareable. Your first step is to add a social share plugin and/or Facebook Share buttons.

Use the Digg Digg plugin because it has all of the buttons you want to display and it floats along the side of the post as the reader scrolls through the article. But you may also want to consider adding static share buttons at the beginning and end of the post that are inline with the article. You can also do this with the Digg Digg plugin.

The Digg Digg plugin has the floating sidebar and inline sharing buttons.

Don’t ignore share buttons on the individual pages of your websites. While people may not be sharing your “Contact me” page, you may have good content on a resource page of your website that you want to allow people to share easily.

Also consider asking for a Facebook share if you feel you have a particularly helpful blog post. Remind readers at the end of your article by saying something like, “Did you find this article helpful? Feel free to share it on Facebook by using the buttons below.” Remember that people are mostly going to share something that is useful to them. When you’re creating content, always keep your customer’s benefit in mind.

#3: Optimize Your Facebook Posts

The next thing you want to do is make sure to optimize the way you post. There are basically three different ways you can post a link to your website, and depending on your audience (and how Facebook’s algorithm happens to be working at the moment), you can get different results.

The traditional way to post a link is just to cut and paste the link into the status section and allow the link to pull in the photo and metadata. The issue with this method is the photo that is pulled in can show up smaller if it isn’t a 1.91:1 ratio.

If the photo on your website is not sized optimally, the link won’t pull in a large photo.

When you have a photo that has the 1:91:1 ratio on your website, it appears larger in the news feed.

And when you have no photo or description at all on your article, the fields are blank.

Another way to post a link is to post a photo and then add the link into the status update with a little blurb about the link. The nice thing about this is that the description travels with the photo when it’s shared so you’re then controlling the message a bit more. The other nice thing is that photos can show up larger in the news feed.

Post an image with the link in a status update.

One technique that has been popular in the past to get greater reach is to post your link in the status section and then “X-out” the link data that is pulled in to change the post to “text only,” even though it has a link in it. The benefit of this in the past has been that text-only posts were getting more reach.

But Facebook recently announced that the new Facebook algorithm will show fewer text posts from pages. So we will have to watch how the effectiveness of this strategy changes.

Changing the post to a text-only post with a link may not work as well in the future.

With all of these approaches, you need to test which one gets the most engagement and drives the most traffic for you.

Once you post the content, you may want to consider boosting it with some advertising. See #5 for more information on advertising on Facebook.

#4: Optimize Other Places on Facebook to Add Links to Your Website

To drive more traffic to your website, make sure you have links in other parts of your Facebook page that people may be visiting.

Use your About page to direct people to different areas of your website.

Add links to your About page to direct people to different areas of your website.

Add links to your milestones.

Milestones stay on your About page and can have links in them.

Add links in your photo descriptions.

When someone clicks on your photo, they will see the photo description.

Use links in your photo descriptions—especially your cover photo, which will be clicked on more often.

Use custom tabs with links to your website.

Consider using an application like NetworkedBlogs to bring in links to your blog posts into the tab automatically.

People can easily access your most recent blog posts.

Optimize your personal profile.

Don’t neglect your own personal profile when considering how you can drive more traffic to your website. Make sure you’re sharing your blog posts to your personal profile and optimize your own About section with links.

Add links to your personal profile About section.

#5: Advertise

Advertising on Facebook can be a great option to get targeted traffic if you have a budget. And with Facebook’s recent announcements about decreased organic reach, advertising is going to be even more critical for marketers.

To drive traffic to your website, you can either create an ad from scratch with a link to your website, or boost content  that you’ve already posted. When you boost content, remember to post something that doesn’t have a photo that has more than 20% text in it or it won’t get approved by Facebook. You can use Facebook’s text overlay tool to measure the amount of text.

Boosting a post with a link in it can be a good idea.

One issue that I’ve found with boosting a post is that it doesn’t usually result in a lot of link clicks. You typically get more likes and comments on the post, which boosts the engagement of the post itself. However, if you truly want clicks to your website, you’re better off using the Ads Manager and choosing that objective.

For a better click-through rate to your website, use the Ads Manager.

Remember to use the news feed ads to help you improve your click-through rate even more because the ads in the right column do not get clicked as much.

Guide your website traffic to achieve your goals.

Finally, make sure you know why you’re driving more traffic to your website. If your website isn’t giving a call to action once your visitors get there, you’re missing the point.

Each piece of content on your website should do something to escort your potential customer further along your sales funnel. You might ask for people to comment on your blog post to engage with them, or tell people to sign up for a freebie so you can get them on your email newsletter list or even pick up the phone to give you a call.

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How to Improve Your Facebook Engagement Using Controlled Experiments

#1: View Insights for Ideas

In your Insights section, you do have some data on your best post types (under Posts), but that can be a function of what types of content you have been posting lately. So you may not get the whole picture if you haven’t been posting many links recently. But it’s a good place to start your investigation.

Take a look at the best post types for your page.

Another good place to start is to look at the Posts section and click on one of the posts. You will get a lot of information on your individual posts. The example shown here is a photo tip, which typically does very well on my page.

Clicking on a post will give you a lot of information.

What I wanted to see is how posts did in a more controlled experiment. If I posted similar information with a link or a text post, would it do as well? Here’s an idea of how you can set up an experiment on your own page to do a little investigation.

#2: Set Up Your Experiment

Start with an outline of types of posts that you want to test and length of time. I ran two different time periods to test the number of posts per day. The longer your testing period, the better your results. But for the purpose of this post, I chose to run my test this way:

Length: Posting 5 times per day for 3 days

Types of Posts: Text, link, photo

Post times and formats:

• 6 am: Informative post with a link and a tag of another Facebook page (text post would remove the link preview, photo post would have the link in the status area)
• 9 am: Tip (link post would include a link to the tip, photo post would include a photographic representation of the tip)
• Noon: Longer post (more text, but also would include a photo or link if needed)
• 3 pm: Question
• 6 pm: Humorous post

For the second experiment I posted 3 times a day with slightly later times: 10 am, 1 pm and 7 pm.

If you’re going to be a purist about this testing, you would post the same information each time and vary the post type each time. But that might not be so fun for your fans.

Once you’ve done your posts, you should wait a day to allow for all the results and then you can start assembling your data.

First, download your post-level data in your Facebook Insights area. Click Export Data, then select your date range and make sure you’ve selected the Post-level data button.

Download your post-level data.

Now you’re going to need to gather the data on four different tabs of the Excel spreadsheet.

Use the different tabs on the Excel spreadsheet to see the data.

#3: Gather the Data

I wanted to know about comments, likes and shares, as well as the clicks, reach and hides for each post. I found that information on each of these tabs within the spreadsheet:

• Lifetime Talking About This: Comments, likes and shares
• Key Metrics: Reach
• Lifetime Post Consumers by Type: Clicks
• Lifetime Negative Feedback: Hides and unlikes

One thing to note on the Lifetime Post Consumers by Type is that you’ll see Link Clicks, Other Clicks and Photo Views. The Other Clicks incorporate when someone clicks anywhere on the post that isn’t the photo or the link—they may click on the headline, the text in the status area or on a See More link if you have a long post.

And a note on the Lifetime Negative Feedback: You’ll have a column for Unlikes of Your Page and the “xbutton_clicks”, which is the Hide button. I take the sum of these columns since they have a similar effect—the person is not consuming your content in the news feed anymore.

Now put these statistics into one spreadsheet so you can compare.

Assemble the data into one spreadsheet.

Sum up the days of data so that you can see what type of post “won” the day.Highlight the winners for each day. Obviously in terms of reach, you may be seeing the same people for each post, but it still equates to potential eyeballs on your posts.

#4: Draw Some Conclusions

From this data, you may see patterns. One thing that’s obvious is that the status updates are the best at comments, likes, reach and other clicks for the two posting schedules. So I need to keep that in mind when doing my posting. But I did see that the link posts did OK in the reach for their posting schedules. I’m not sure how the link posts got photo views in the second round of testing so that was unusual.

The other thing you can do is compare the time slots between the posts and see if a certain type of post does better in one time slot. I noticed that the midday photo posts seemed to perform well compared to the other times during the day that I posted photos. After running this experiment, I might make sure my midday post has a photo.

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8 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Engagement

#1: Solve Problems With Photos

Posts with a simple image and a caption that shows fans the solution to a problem or a way to improve their daily lives receive marked engagement.

Whole Foods uses this post tactic to encourage fan discussions about product-related solutions to common problems.

Whole Foods boosts engagement by sharing lifestyle tips.

Tips for posting images to Facebook:

• Larger images tend to get more likes, shares and comments. Use the Upload Photos/Video function to publish photo files directly into your post instead of posting a link that shows a thumbnail.
• Optimize images for the 403 x 403 pixel display in the timeline. Larger images display from the center of the image, and some of the edges may not appear in the news feed unless a user clicks through.

Find a great selection of socially recommended how-to’s on Snapguide or Reddit’s Life Pro Tips.

#2: Give a Shout-out to Your Customers

People love to see their content and their friends’ content shared by brands.

Use your fans’ content instead of your own to give your post a viral push through specific communities that are close to the content creator.

Starbucks showcased a talented customer’s drawing as their cover photo, then provided a shout-out to this dedicated customer by including a link to the artist’s Instagram profile in the image description.

Starbucks uses customers' art in their cover photo.

Every few weeks, Walmart creates a new seasonal cover image with photos of real people from their fan base.

Check out a recent one below:

Walmart using fan photos for its cover photo.

Tips for customer shout-outs:

• Cross-promote your Facebook shout-outs with Instagram and Twitter to extend your reach and impact.
• Call attention to fans who show off your products or promote your brand.
• Capitalize on brand-related content from clubs and teams with many members to boost your shout-out exposure.

#3: Involve Customers With a Question

Every customer wants to be heard and questions let them use their voice in the form of comments.

Ask your fans to share about consumer preferences, help you name a product or describe memories and moments associated with your brand.

When Skittles asked fans to describe the moment they opened a pack of the candy, the post received over 5,000 interactions.

Skittles asks questions to engage their Facebook fans.

London Drugs asks their fans to weigh in on either/or questions.

London Drugs' "Crafty or Tacky" photo.

Tips for asking questions on Facebook:

• Keep your questions simple.
• Relate questions to specific consumer lifestyles, such as where or how they use your product.
• Monitor your customer feedback on Facebook posts and comments, Twitter mentions and emails to find question topic ideas.

#4: Let Them Fill in the Blank

Use a short sentence with one word missing to generate a significant amount of comments, likes and shares.

Pringles used a fill-in-the-blank post to connect their chips with a relaxing summer holiday. A bonus of this tactic is that Pringles got a snapshot of their fans’ product preferences by monitoring the comments.

Pringles markets using fill-in-the-blank posts.

Tips for fill-in-the-blank posts on Facebook:

• Use fill-in-the-blank posts as a two-pronged engagement tactic: interact with your online community and get to know them better for future marketing campaigns.
• Use the post tactic in conjunction with a specific event, such as a summer holiday or a family ski trip.
• Awkward or funny situations get people to engage on a more personal level.

#5: Crowdsource Photo Captions

Photo caption posts combine the allure of photos with people’s love of interacting with brands they identify with.

Think about the emotion you want to trigger and choose an image that makes participating irresistible. Upload your image and write a short description that invites fans to provide a caption.

In keeping with their core 125-year-old brand, National Geographic posts the world’s best photos from experts and amateurs alike. They interact with their Facebook fans by asking for captions. This one post had over 250,000 interactions.

National Geographic invites us to do what we've always dreamed of—contribute to its photos.

Tips for photo captions on Facebook:

• Use inspiring, provocative or humorous images for captioning.
• To add a boost to your photo caption engagement, offer an incentive through a photo caption contest.

#6: Share Quotes

Quotes are great for engaging people’s “Me, too!” feelings. On Facebook this is especially powerful as the Like button makes it easy for fans to express that feeling. A quote can associate your brand with good feelings and create a deeper connection with your market on Facebook.

Just like Apple used imagery of iconic 20^th-century personalities in its “Think Different” campaign, you can use quotes from icons to reinforce your company’s brand.

Disney uses quotes from their feature films to inspire, relate to and create funny moments with their audience. Each quote is posted with a full image to increase engagement.

Disney shares a classic quote to connect emotionally with their audience.

Tips for quotes on Facebook:

• Tie your brand to quotes that support your campaign goals.
• Use visuals and memes with your quotes to increase shareability—a few good sites to create memes are Quickmeme, Imgflip and Memecrunch.
• Find quotes on Bartleby.com and The Quotations Page, or use a #quote hashtag search on Facebook or Twitter.

#7: Gather Votes With Like vs. Share

Ask your fans to like a post to vote for option A, or share the post to vote for option B. Because vote counts are visible, fans are motivated to participate.

Walmart frequently uses the like vs. share post with a mashup of two competing images and a small graphic overlay of a like vs. share icon. They post the full image with a brief description that tells fans how to participate.

Walmart directly asks for likes and shares by giving their fans a face-off.

Tips for like vs. share posts on Facebook:

• Use controversial choices that evoke strong emotions within your community.
• Integrate your product or brand in the posts.
• Use digital image editing applications like Photoshop, Photofiltre or Paint.netto create your image with a graphic overlay that shares simple participation instructions.

viahttp://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-fan-engagement-tips/

#8: Use Hashtags

A relatively new addition to Facebook, hashtags use categorized terms behind a # symbol to increase brand, product and campaign awareness to wider audiences.

Sephora uses the hashtag “#OneQuickQuestion” to open up engagement for a campaign beyond the reach of their current fans.

Sephora spreads its reach with #hashtags.

Tips for #hashtags on Facebook:

• Use tags to create awareness and engagement for specific marketing campaigns such as contests or product sales.
• Use common terms such as #socialmedia in your hashtags to increase post dialogue and visibility.
• Search for hashtags being used by your customers, competitors and partners to find keywords and conversations you can participate in.

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