Know Your Competition on Facebook - Boost your Blog BB#100

Did you learn a lot from studying your analytics about what types of posts your audience likes and interacts with? Now we will take that very information we found for you on Facebook to Know your Competition! Yes, we are going there. But, let’s call it benchmarking… because really that is what we are trying to do. Determine how successful we are compared to others in our niche. We can learn a lot from others who are bigger than we are. We will look to the pages that are really growing to see if we can gather some intelligence about YOUR audience. How do we know who they are? Keep reading…

Graph Searches

If you haven’t started using this powerful search, you will fall in love once you try them. This is how can we study other pages that your audience likes. Simply use this search string in Facebook and replace “hip homeschool moms” with the name of your blog:

Favorite pages of people who like Hip Homeschool Moms

So what are we going to do with this information?

The Challenge: Study Your Most Successful Competitors

Now let’s spend some time understanding what is working for your largest competitors. Study the engagement, see which types of posts were the most successful. Document the following information:

How often did the post?
When?
What type of posts (pictures, links, statuses, videos, contests, trivia, )?
What were the most successful posts?
How much did the page interact with their audience?
Notice the apps and tabs they are using would these benefit your audience?
Do they repost other brands content?
Do they use hashtags often?
Do they post sponsored content?

The key comparison to track is engagement rates by days, time of post, by content type and topic allows you to really start learning.

Resources to Help Analyze Your Competitors (and Yourself)

Likealyzer. LikeAlyzer helps you to measure and analyze the potential and effectiveness of your Facebook Page. It allows you to monitor, compare and explore all the possibilities of your Facebook Page by evaluating your activity to ensure your success on the most popular social network in the world – Facebook.
Fan Page Karma. is a paid tool that provides a free version that allows you to do a pretty detailed analysis of your Facebook Page and a comparison with your competitors.
Conversation Score. CScore is a free tool that performs an analysis of your Facebook Page, categorizes and gives it a score based on the behavior of your Page.
AgoraPulse Barometer. This report provides an analysis of your Facebook Page and compares it against other companies’ Pages (that also used this tool) that have a similar number of fans. It calculates the average percentage on several criteria based on your last 50 posts. The report shows the score for your Page received compared with the average score for other Pages that ran this assessment.

Share Your Thoughts, Tools and Insights

As you are working through my challenges, please share your thoughts and insights in a comment. If you are using different tools that are working, please include those as well. I am not the sage of Facebook social media… I just spend a lot of time analyzing and trying to help grow our Social Media success. So help me learn from you as well! I am just like you, I want to grow my blogs too, ya’ know 🙂

I know these challenges are harder than most, but because Facebook is changing, we have to really understand our niche to be effective. I encourage you to take your time…. if it can’t be done overnight, come back after you have completed that day’s challenge before you start the next one. These challenges will build on each other!

Be sure to read the other posts in this series:

Day one: Know your Audience
Day two: Know your Competition
Day three: The Goal of Social Media
Day four: Turn Off the Autofeeds
Day five: Methodically Test Your Posts
Day six: Testing Which Posts Work
Day seven: Pay to Play
Day eight: Be Prepared to Change
Day nine: Start a Group
Day ten: Content is King and Social Media His Queen

Be sure to visit the other co-hosts and do their challenges as well!

Lisa from Squishable Baby wrote a series on Giveaways
Michelle from Simplify, Live, Love wrote a series on Grammar
Thaleia from Something 2 Offer wrote a series on Blog Photos and one on Commenting
Martiel from Amazing Success Academy wrote a series onSEO and one on Blog Titles and Topics
Honey from Honey’s Life wrote a series on Twitter

Until next time…