Which company doesn’t want to take a look behind the closed doors of its competitors and see what they are planning, which strategies are being developed and what are their biggest hits and misses. Of course, in the end you have to find your own way, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t gather some inspiration or learn form others’ experience from time to time.
And even if we can’t tell you what color the CMO’s hair has or which accounting software they use, when it comes to Facebook, Fanpage Karma can give you a lot of “insider” intel. And that makes perfect sense, because it sparks new ideas and shows you untapped potentials that you can utilize for your company.
1. What do they (not) post?
To know how to be remarkable you have to get a feeling for the status quo. That’s easy: Just take a look at the post history and the top- and flop posts of your competitors. That doesn’t only give you some ideas for your own content, but often reveals some weaknesses, that you can exploit.
Especially when it comes to service-centered companies (Insurances, Banks, Retail etc.) the posts with the most reactions are the most interesting for you. Deep in the comments you’ll find some hidden gems and valuable information about what their fans are craving for and what’s important to them – after all you need some serious emotional trigger to comment on a Facebook post.
Not always a conversation goes in the way you want it to, like here on BMW’s page.
The benchmarking area and the single page analysis gives you a complete post history, the top- and flop posts and even tells you the used hashtags, words and links.
2. Do they care?
Speaking of service: People use Facebook as a feedback channel more than ever. The walls of big corporations are cluttered with questions about shipping, errors and general inquiries. So it’s not unimportant to know how well your competition is catering to that kind of interaction. Do their fans have to wait a long time to get a response or does the page even ignore these posts all together? If your rivals don’t like service it’s your time to rise and shine.
You find all the info you need under “Fan Posts” in the detailed analysis for single pages – even a handy fanpost-timeline, which makes identifying and analyzing for example a shitstorm easy as pie.
3. What do their fans like?
Let’s say you want your competitors’ fans to pay your page a visit via FacebookAds. This works best if you know what their fans are into.
For example Target could take a look at the table up there, only target (HA! See what we did there?) Walmart’s fans and show them ads that feature some cooperation with T-Mobile or show them their better-than-subway make-your-own-sandwich-kits. This way Target wouldn’t just say “HEY, we’re super cool”. They’d actually provide something useful. What’s not to like?
Just head over to the “Influencers” section and learn even more about the fans’ likes with our Activity Graph, which gives you a whole network of topics, which might be interesting for your rivals’ fans.
4. LSD?
We presented the utility-matrix on the AllFacebook marketing conference in October. Here you see that any post need to have value for the fan and value for the company. We called it LSD which stands for Laugh, Save, Discover. That means a post should be emotional for the fan or it should offer or teach him something.
It is a good thing for you to know your competitor’s strategy trusting and if that could work for you, too. Do they post content about promotions, emotions or information?
Check it with our tagging feature. Here you can add tags to posts (for example laugh, save, discover) and see which content is used how often and how successful it becomes. You can do that way more detailed of course if you like and analyze for instance the type of posts (picture, text, link or video) as well.
5. How did they develop over time?
Last but not least it is a good idea to check the performance of the page by analyzing a few KPIs. Were there some extraordinary incidents for example a lot of new fans in a short time period or single peaks at the engagement or post interaction?
If you want to be up to date you should use our morning report and instant alert. In the morning report we send you a daily summary about the day before. You find all interesting key facts about any page you want: what did they post? What was the top post? What was the flop post? How many new fans did they make and how much interaction?
If you decide to use the instant alert you simply choose the pages you want to monitor. As soon as one of them posts something on Facebook you’ll get an immediate email notifying you about the post.
Wrap up
It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for inspiration or ways to exploit weaknesses: Taking a close look at your competitors can give you a lot of interesting information. And your intern doesn’t even have to learn how to pick locks.
