How to Track Competitors on Facebook in 2022

How to Track Competitors on Facebook in 2022

If you’re playing the social media game, it’s very likely you want to win it, be in the lead, or at least not far off the podium. To get a snapshot of your current social media status and measure your progress, you should watch your competition.

Keeping an eye on your competitors on Facebook is a smart business.

Not only will you know where they are present, what they do, which of their posts garner the most responses – you will also have a chance to learn from them and stay on top of major industry developments.

With a bit of curiosity and knowledge, you can find out how to improve your Facebook marketing strategy and progress faster.

Luckily, there are easy ways to learn how others are doing.

But before you learn how to track competitors on Facebook, let me give you the main reasons why you should observe how your competitors manage their social networks in general.

Track competitors on Facebook and compare multiple FB Pages

Track competitors on Facebook and compare multiple FB Pages

With NapoleonCat, you can analyze both your own FB Pages and also your competitors. Figure out what content performs best, when’s the best time to post, get content ideas, and more! Try NapoleonCat for free:

Try NapoleonCat free for 14 days. No credit card required.

Facebook competitor analysis – why you should do it

Let’s take a closer look at why you should monitor your competitors on Facebook, and what are the benefits of competitive analysis on social media.

It helps you establish your own KPIs

Success is relative – to know if you’re making any progress, you should compare your current results with previous achievements. Thus, the most important thing is to establish and track your own KPIs (key performance indicators).

But if you want to know how satisfying your progress is – “great”, “bad” or “mediocre” – you have to know where the rest of your industry is and how it is advancing.

You won’t need to repeat others’ mistakes

While it’s wise and valuable to learn from your own mistakes, it’s actually better to learn from somebody else’s. Following your top competitors’ Pages and keeping an eye on what they are doing can help you avoid repeating their mistakes.

More importantly, it will allow you to develop and refine your own social media marketing strategy and adjust the best tactics.

Learning what type of content performs best with your competitors’ audiences or finding out the best times to post to get the highest engagement is really easy with the right tools and will help you build your competitive advantage and grow faster.

Little cost for great insights

Business and customer intelligence at low cost – following the ads your competitors are posting and listening to what their customers say, what problems and requests they have is priceless.

With such knowledge, you can quickly adjust your product and customer support strategy to win the market. You already have sales leads to contact and convert.

You should be ready to take advantage of every arising opportunity and acquire new customers when your competitors fail to provide them with good service.

How to track competitors on Facebook using Facebook Insights

Now that you know why it’s useful to spy on your competitors’ Pages on Facebook, let’s see how you can do it. One way is to use the social media platform itself.

Important: The original Facebook Analytics tool is no longer available after June 30, 2021.

Currently, Facebook offers the Insights tool. It does have some basic competitor monitoring features, however, the data is limited to only the last 7 days.

You’ll find the following metrics:

  • the number of Page fans,
  • the number of posts published in the last 7 days,
  • the total number of comments and shares, and reactions to posts (in the last 7 days).

To access Facebook Insights, go to your Facebook Page Insights and find the Pages to Watch feature at the bottom of the Overview tab. Click the Add Pages button to add the first competitor’s Facebook page:

Tracking competitors on Facebook
Facebook competitor analysis – Facebook Analytics

Within this tab, you can track the latest stats of total Page likes, see their top posts from the last week, and check their weekly engagement.

You can also see the best-performing posts from the pages you started watching. To do this, go to the Posts tab and access the Top Posts from Pages You Watch list through the top menu.

You will see the list of the top five posts published during the last seven days, ranked by engagement, which is the total number of comments, shares, and reactions.

Top posts from pages to watch on Facebook
Facebook competitor analysis – Facebook Analytics

This is the easiest way to monitor your competition on Facebook for free. Unfortunately, it has its limitations – the data provided is very basic and limited to the last week.

So, what can you do to get more detailed Facebook Page insights for other Pages?

Let’s look at some other, more advanced solutions, ones without any time frame limitations and with a lot more different data metrics.

Facebook competitor analysis in NapoleonCat

You can and you should dig deeper. If you’re serious about social media competitor analysis, then you’ll need the right tool to get Facebook Page insights for other Pages to get in-depth data.

NapoleonCat gives you effortless, real-time benchmarking. You can easily create a set of your competitors’ Facebook Pages and directly compare all KPIs and even set custom time periods – days, months, or even years.

The screen below shows a set of five Facebook Pages of large automotive brands. You can easily compare multiple Facebook Pages, and with a very quick look, you can see which brands do better in terms of basic metrics like the engagement rate and make better progress compared to previous periods.

However, this is just a glimpse of what you can find inside NapoleonCat’s Facebook Analytics.

Competitive analysis of automotive companies
Compare Facebook Pages side by side.

Such comparative analysis makes it easier to identify the best practices in your industry and predict your audience’s reactions to your content marketing strategy.

Facebook competitor analysis tool

Facebook competitor analysis tool

Measure your social media results. Track competitors and improve performance using one simple tool. Try NapoleonCat for free:

Try NapoleonCat free for 14 days. No credit card required.

It’s obvious that your most important posts should go up when the chance of achieving the best reach and engagement is at its highest. But when is that, exactly?

You can easily identify the best times to post on Facebook by grouping a few brand pages together into a comparative set and investigating a longer period of time, let’s say six months (to make sure you have enough posts to draw viable conclusions).

Comparative set - NapoleonCat competitive analysis
Finding best times to post on Facebook (Facebook account comparison).

The example above shows such an analysis made for five automotive brand pages. You can quickly notice that posts published on Thursdays and Saturdays generate the highest engagement on Facebook.

And high engagement also means higher organic reach. Thus, for more important announcements, you should choose those days rather than Wednesdays.

Of course, that’s just an example. You should run your own analysis and figure out which days are top-performing – for your industry, location, and audience.

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned customer intelligence as one of the important reasons to analyze your competitors on Facebook. As you know, Facebook has become one of the main customer service channels.

Dissatisfied customers don’t bother calling or emailing a brand anymore. They just go to Facebook and share their experiences publicly.

With NapoleonCat, you can analyze individual posts and comments from your competitors’ Pages to easily define what problems your competitors face and what their customers need.

comparisons analytics airlines set messages from users
Facebook Page insights for other pages – posts and comments

The screenshot above (you can zoom in for details) showcases the posts that Facebook users added to a few major airlines’ brand Pages over a fixed period of time.

It clearly points to the fact that Lufthansa has problems with customer service and many people are disappointed with waiting too long for a response.

This knowledge could help other brands build their competitive advantage by delivering better customer care and focusing on quickly responding to their customers’ messages.

Imagine how much money you would have to pay for competitor research that involves questioning customers of competitive airlines who have recently used their services and were not fully satisfied. A lot.

And this is just a very basic example of how such information can be used to improve your business strategy, not just in social media.

Create Facebook reports in 1 minute (+ compare Facebook Pages)

You can also use NapoleonCat to generate in-depth Facebook reports for your own Pages, as well as your competitors’. The whole process takes about a minute from start to finish.

All you need to do is pick the time frame for your analysis, choose the Facebook Page(s), and select the metrics that you wish to include in your report. By default, all metrics are selected.

You can also generate reports for up to 8 Facebook Pages at once!

You can easily create a report that includes competitive analytics for up to 8 Facebook Pages.

Here’s a sample summary page from such a report (which usually contains over 30 pages):

How to track competitors on Facebook - bulk reports
Sample page from a Facebook competitive report – FB account comparison

And you can also schedule your reports so that they’ll be automatically generated and sent out every day, week, or month.

Having such a report will help you better organize your data and have a clearer view of all the metrics.

Below you can see a sample report for a competitor’s Facebook Page (you can also navigate through the video to see how to generate such a report):

I hope you have learned why and how you should monitor your competition on Facebook. Set up a trial NapoleonCat account and look deeper into your competitors’ Facebook strategies. It’s completely free for 14 days, no credit card required.

Sign up for a
14-day free trial

Try NapoleonCat free for 14 days. No credit card required.

Try NapoleonCat free for 14 days. No credit card required.