How To Track & Analyze Competitors On Facebook

While brands use several social media platforms to improve brand visibility and run marketing campaigns, Facebook remains the most popular among them all. 

Currently, the social media giant boasts 2.9 billion active users. Hence, businesses across industries focus on Facebook marketing to reach a wider audience and grow their consumer base. 

That’s why Facebook competitor analysis is crucial to reap the benefits of today’s wide-ranging digital presence properly. 

As a brand, you constantly need to monitor your competitors’ marketing strategy, what works for them and what doesn’t. It helps you improve your marketing standards on Facebook and avoid their mistakes. 

To make your journey easier, here is a comprehensive guide detailing the intricacies of Facebook competitor analysis.

What is a Facebook competitor analysis?

Facebook competitor analysis is the process of examining your competitor’s activity on Facebook to collect data and benchmark the standards of social media marketing. 

Reports generated in the process help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors in the industry and provide actionable insights into their overall social media strategy.

Doing a Facebook competitor analysis can improve your marketing efforts. Here’s how.

5 Benefits of tracking and analyzing competitors on Facebook

Here are a few of the benefits you can get from carrying out a comprehensive Facebook competitor analysis:

1. Figure out competitors

The only way to stand out among the immense crowd on Facebook is to understand your industry’s contenders thoroughly. A Facebook competitor analysis helps you understand your competitors, analyze their strategy and get an edge in the market. 

For example, Nike uses it for image sharing, whereas Adidas has a dedicated shop page.

2. Refine the target audience

You and your top competitors have a similar target market. 

Facebook competitor analysis enables you to examine how your rivals interact with the audience, their tone, and the frequency of their communication. 

You get to see what segments of your audience are the most interested in your industry and what drives them. This way, you refine your target audience and focus on them instead of running around social media. 

Facebook competitors analysis also helps you understand what sort of content drives the most engagement among your audience on Facebook. 

It enables you to focus your resources on curating a social media experience that’s personalized and has the highest chance of bringing traffic. 

For example, Starbucks and Costa Coffee focus on themed content to attract an audience.

3. Set performance benchmarks

An increase in your Facebook post’s engagement is a valuable metric, but it becomes even more valuable when you compare it to your competitors. Benchmarking your performance puts things into perspective. It lets you evaluate your own performance in the industry. This way, you have time to align your progress with your social media goals. 

4. A baseline for Facebook marketing strategy

Tracking your competitors will help you create a strong baseline for your own Facebook marketing strategy. You learn what type of content performs the best in your space. This helps you change your existing strategy and suits the customer’s gaze while staying true to your brand. 

Facebook competitor analysis empowers you to learn from the mistakes your rival brands make. Monitoring what your top competitors are doing wrong will prevent you from repeating their missteps. You also identify the best times to post to get the highest engagement, build a competitive advantage and grow faster.

5. Cost-effective

Facebook competitor analysis provides you with business and customer intelligence at a low cost. Monitoring the competitor’s posts allows you to track posts attracting traffic. 

It also helps you examine what their customers say about the brand and what their suggestions and problems are. Without investing too much money, you can effortlessly get valuable insights and improve your strategy. You can even invest in a tool like Keyhole to do a thorough Facebook competitor analysis.

How to do a Facebook competitor analysis

Follow these simple steps to get started on your Facebook competitor analysis:

Step 1: Identify competitors

The first step to running a successful Facebook competitor analysis is understanding social media competitors differ from your regular business competitors. 

Here, your focus is to grab your audience’s attention. To do that, you need to identify who to track. 

There are two types of Facebook competitors: direct and indirect. 

• Direct competitors offer products and services that are like yours. 
• Indirect competitors offer products and services that can replace yours. 

Tackling your indirect competitors needs refinement. So, you need to use the Facebook algorithm in your favor.

Step 2: Set filters for key metrics

The next step is to collect data from your competitor’s pages, identify key metrics, and set filters for those. For example, go to a page and compare the number of people who like it against the people who follow it. Chances are the people who merely like a page won’t interact as much as the ones who follow the page. 

Here are the metrics you should monitor for competitor analysis: 

• Recent ads
• Average likes on the page 
• Average followers on the page
• Average engagement rates on the recent posts
• Links to the most liked content or unicorn content

Here, tracking the unicorn content is the most important filter. It will show you what type of content outperforms others. Another factor to keep in mind while setting up key metric filters is to focus on the people who follow your competitors, not just like their page. 

Step 3: Get a performance summary

After setting up the filters, it is now time to generate a performance summary. This will be an assessment of the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.

It helps you determine how you compare with competitors in the same market. Essentially, it involves getting information about a company’s biggest competitors to improve the business.

Step 4: Examine the results 

The generated performance summary is the navigation you need to improve your Facebook brand image. But for that, you comprehensively need to analyze the results. Check the comparison data to see where you are lacking. 

These are the points you want to focus on while applying changes. See what drives their growth and engagement the most. Top brands always have some highlights to attract an audience and stand out. Your job is to identify that from the results.

Step 5: Check their content

The driving force behind every brand’s social media visibility is the content they post. Thus, it is essential to go beyond the mere likes and comments and evaluate your competitor’s Facebook marketing strategy. 

See what kind of content brings them the most attention. Are they leveraging Facebook reels? Or are you contenders hosting live sessions with industry experts? 

The bottom line is you must monitor the competitor’s post frequency, content tonality, content forms, etc. Check their page thoroughly and prepare extensive answers to such questions. 

This is a crucial part of a Facebook competitor analysis. Without this step, your whole effort would just be scratching the surface. 

Of course, these steps are easy to execute. But if you want to simplify your Facebook competitor analysis, read the later section of this blog.

How to get started with Facebook competitor analysis

Here are the only 3 steps you need to do a thorough Facebook competitor analysis:

1. Do an account comparison

Collecting data and evaluating both your and your competitor’s performance are essential to growing as a brand on social media. For that, you need to leverage profile analytics. It helps you measure and grow not only Facebook but all your social media accounts on a single platform.

Doing this manually is time-consuming and will not be effective enough with multiple competitor accounts. To create accurate industry benchmarks and spy on the competition with account tracking, you need an efficient tool. 

Keyhole brings all the competitor analysis reports into one dashboard for you to compare side-by-side. Here are some of the metrics you can analyze:

• Post engagement 
• Growth rate
• Frequently used post types 
• Most engaging post types

2. Decide the important metrics

Once you figure out who your top competitors are, you need to identify what metrics to track. This will further help you examine how your brand is performing on Facebook compared to the others in the industry. Growth in followers, engagement rate, likes, comments, etc., are some of the metrics you can track for better results. 

Apart from that, you can also monitor the total page fans of your key competitors, the tidal number of posts your competitors share each week, the weekly increase and decrease of likes each week, etc. 

Tools like Keyhole identify important metrics for your brand and set up filters to analyze the growth accurately. 

3. Track performance frequently

Competitor tracking can’t be a once-in-a-blue-moon activity if you want to see visible results. It has to be continuous and consistent with each brand. Consumer needs and perceptions of social media are changing every day. 

Naturally, both your and your competitors’ performance will vary from time to time. Missing out on any subtle change may cause ineffective and inaccurate reports. 

Keyhole tracks your and your rival brand’s Facebook performance constantly. Moreover, with the platform’s Quick Trend feature, you can get a glimpse of your competitor’s online presence history for up to 6 months. 

Here’s an example of Adidas:

Some details you can see in the above screenshot are:

• They have 8.1 million posts
• Their users have reached 7.6 million
• They have garnered a massive reach with 42.6 billion potential impressions

How to do competitor analysis on Facebook using Keyhole

Here are the steps you need to conduct an accurate Facebook competitor analysis using Keyhole:

1. Add the Facebook profiles of your competitors to Keyhole’s Profile Analytics

• First, log into your keyhole account
• And click on the ‘Profile Analytics’ tab

• A new page will open where you will see an orange button showing “Add New Profile”

• Click on it and select the “Analyze New profile” option
• You will see several social media options for you to track. Select the Facebook button.

• Enter your brand’s name and then add the name of the competitors you want to track. 
• Once you enter the names, the “create comparison” button will turn orange. Click on it to proceed. 
• Wait for Keyhole to backfill the data (so just a few seconds).

2. Create a comparison report

You will see that Keyhole has pulled up your account tracker data up to one year’s worth. You can also view the date range in the top right corner.

If you wish to analyze a specific range, you can do a custom range selection from the calendar or select one from the pre-listed ranges appearing on your left-hand side. 

Once Keyhole compiles all the relevant data, you can use the results to identify trends and track what time of the day or day of the week the content gets the most attention. Such insights will help you form your content better and schedule them at the right times to get the best engagement rates. 

The comparison reports show you how your selected account has performed over a specific period. Keyhole also enables you to export or download this report via Google Sheets, in PDF or XLS form, or through the “Share” button. 

You can also click on the orange “Authenticate” button to get additional metrics.

Still have questions? Check out our detailed video for step-by-step directions. 

3. Analyze your competitors’ top post type & follower growth

Keyhole also shows you a list of your top posts based on engagement sorted according to dates and graphs of follower growth over time.

You can also analyze their performance through infographics and pie charts on your most frequent post types, most frequent media types, etc. You can also identify those that have been most appealing to your followers. 

Conclusion

Facebook’s popularity is why brands prefer it for their social media marketing. But for that very reason, a Facebook competitor analysis is far more complicated than it seems. 

With the right tool, you can leverage this crowd for your benefit. By monitoring your rival brands, you can create a social media marketing strategy that builds a substantial audience base. With the right approach, there is a chance for this audience to join you on other platforms too. 

To get accurate competitor analysis and make the most of social media, start your free trial with Keyhole today!

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