I thought it’ll be safe to say that most businesses have their own competitors. Let this article guide you on how to track your competitors and, perhaps, overtake them. This winning Facebook marketing strategies will help you gain competitive advantage.

1. Knowing your Competitors

As a business owner, we should know our competitors’ information because it could give us an advantage on how could our business benefit our customers better as well as how our business could be unique from theirs.

Identifying your competitors is just simply finding those businesses that offer similar products or services.

There are two types of competitors:

  • Direct Competitors
    These are businesses that are offering similar goods or services with your business.
  • Indirect Competitors
    These are businesses that are offering different types of products but provide the same needs for your customers.

Example: Yellow Cab Pizza and Pizza Hut are direct competitors, whereas Goldilocks is their indirect competitor.

Important things to outline:

  • Top 5 direct competitors
  • Top 5 indirect competitors
  • Products or services your competitors are offering
  • Competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
  • Competitors’ Facebook page URL
  • Competitors’ Facebook page likes and fan count
  • Customized tabs they use
  • Promotions or events they use (if any)

There should be more things that you can add on your competitor analysis; however, let me share to you first how to easily track them before we proceed on more important things on knowing your Facebook competitors better.

2. Do Facebook Competitor Analysis through Facebook Interest List

Facebook Interests lets you subscribe to interest lists or create your own. Guess by now, you already know that you don’t even need to like your competitors’ Facebook page just to track their posts or whatever they are doing. Through Facebook Interests, you can actually track all of them by just visiting the interest list you’ve made.

If you want to know more about interest lists, you might want to visit Facebook FAQ and learn more about it.

Steps on how to create Facebook Interest List

1. Log in your account and proceed on this link. You can actually see your interests list on your Facebook Account Dashboard that is located at the left side. It is usually located below your Apps (Apps Center and Games Feed).
2. Once you have clicked the link above, you should see the Interests List Dashboard. Just go ahead and click “Create List” (as shown at the image below).

3. Search for your competitors’ pages or your competitors’ personal profile and add them. You can select as many as you want (as of this writing, I cannot tell what is the limit or how many people and pages you can add on your interests list).
4. Once you’ve added all the accounts (pages and profiles) that you want to track, just click “Next”.
5. Name your interests list and choose who can see your list. After you’ve finished doing this, click “Done”.

Congratulations! Now that your interest list for competitor analysis and tracking is ready, what’s next then? What you can do is to know your Facebook competitors better:

  • Track the time your competitors post their updates.
  • Know how many posts they do every day or every week.
  • Be aware of the kind of updates or contents their current fans love most.
  • Know how they engage with their fans.

There are lots of things that you can track about your competitors and add on your competitor analysis. Just remember that your main goal is to make your business better and more unique than theirs are on Facebook.

3. Control Facebook’s News Feed

Once you’ve successfully done the steps above, the next thing to do is to overtake them by taking control of Facebook News Feed especially if you know that you probably have some fans who liked both your page and your competitor’s page.

How to do this? Let me answer it in a simple and easy way—let them post their updates ahead of you. Example, if they post at twelve o’clock midnight, post your updates around 12:01 a.m. or 12:05 a.m.

Why? If you do this, your post will be positioned higher than their post on Facebook News Feed, which will make your fans (assuming you have fans who liked both your business page and your competitors page) see the update you’ve made easier than your competitor’s update.

Want to gain more advantage on news feed? You might want to run Facebook Ads by using “Promote Page Posts” and get people to see and engage with your important messages.

You can also try to promote your posts. You can promote page posts while you’re creating them or within about 3 days after posting. More about promoted posts can be seen on Facebook Promoted Posts FAQ.

Your Turn:

Now that you know how to track your competitors and overtake them, it’s now time to try effective Facebook marketing strategies for businesses and win your Facebook marketing competition.