HOW TO USE FACEBOOK DATA
TO ANALYZE YOUR COMPETITORS
HOW TO USE FACEBOOK DATA TO ANALYZE YOUR COMPETITORS
Imagine a world where you have access to your competitors’ Omniture
databases, email metrics, ad spend data, and CRM dashboards. What juicy
insights could you extract? It would be a dream come true for data-driven
marketers! The bad news: some dreams are not meant to be. The good
news: social media opens another major channel for accessing tons of
data about your competitors. Why? Because nearly all of their social media
content, campaigns, and programs are happening in public. Consider the
public data streams you can access about your competitors on Facebook...
• Content posted BY your competitor
• Content posted ABOUT your competitor
• Specific customer feedback and complaints about your competitors
• Performance metrics on all aspects of your competitor’s Facebook page community
• Responsiveness and customer service efficiency
• Page structure and organization (global pages vs. single page vs.
product pages)
So how do you make use of all this data to inform your own Facebook
strategy? There are three related but distinct ways to put this data to work:
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Key Question
Type of Analysis
COMPETITIVE
BENCHMARKS
How do I stack up to competitors
across my social KPIs & metrics?
Quantitative
COMPETITIVE
ANALYSIS
What are my competitors doing on
Facebook? Which strategies and
tactics work for them?
Quantitative
&
Qualitative
COMPETITIVE
INSIGHTS
What actions can I take to stand
out from the competition?
Qualitative
COMPETITIVE BENCHMARKS
Benchmarks give context to your own metrics by providing an important
point of comparison. Instead of saying, “We had 4,500 people engaged
on Facebook this month,” you can give context like, “We had 4,500 people
engaged this month, 20% higher than industry average and a 10% gain
month over month against our top competitor.” The key is to determine which
competitors you want to compare against, which KPIs matter, and how to
set a regular cadence for tracking change and trends. This is often a great
fit for your weekly or monthly scorecards. Here are just a handful of the
metrics and ratios you can track on Facebook. We’re looking at a segment
of top retailers from the perspective of Best Buy and highlighting a specific
comparison to Macy’s, the industry engagement leader.
Best Buy Facebook Competitive Scorecard (January 2014)
Your KPIs
Best Buy Total
Industry Benchmark
W/W Change
Industry Average
Industry Leader
BB vs. Avg.
Macy’s Total
BB vs. Leader
50%
Audience
Total Fans
6,924,505
5.0%
5,219,036
133%
13,985,263
New Fans
10,840
12%
96,227
11%
181,021
6%
Fan Growth Rate
0.2%
1%
1.9%
8%
1.3%
12%
Share of Audience
13%
-1%
10%
133%
26%
50%
Total Engagement
53,624
0%
168,874
32%
514,072
10%
Engagement Rate
0.8%
5%
3.2%
24%
3.7%
21%
Engagement Per Post
958
11%
3,748
26%
12,852
7%
Share of Engagement
3.4%
4%
10.7%
32%
32.7%
10%
Brand Posts Per Day
1.8
7%
1.7
109
1.3
140
User Posts Per Day
62
1%
35
177%
26
241%
85%
-2%
48%
177%
63%
135%
53
5%
12
433%
16
326%
Engagement
Content
Responsiveness
Response Rate
Responses Per Day
Contact the Simply Measured Account Services team
to learn about custom competitive scorecards like this
for all your social media channels.
3
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Your benchmarks will often give you some idea of where to drill down, but
the most important analysis requires some digging. Deeper competitive
analysis is more of a question and answer session with your Facebook data
than a fixed scorecard. Benchmarks give you 4 of the 5 W’s—What, Who,
Where, and When. Analysis helps you understand Why.
KEY QUESTIONS:
What content and tactics are working for competitors?
What are they doing that is different from your brand?
Zooming out from our Best Buy scorecard, we can analyze the content
tactics of industry leaders. Macy’s is not only the leader on total
engagement—their engagement rate (per fan) is also above the 3.2%
industry average. This analysis also shows us Nordstrom rivaling Macy’s on
total engagement and achieving a much higher engagement rate per fan.
Fan Page Comparison: Total Engagement on Brand Posts
Total Engagement
600K
Total Engagement
514K
Engagement as % of Fans
20%
16.7%
500K
15%
401K
400K
10%
300K
195K
200K
100K
5.5%
95K
3.7%
54K
2.4%
1.8%
.8%
5%
97K
2.1%
3.3%
72K
2.3%
57K
51K
.9%
36K
0
0%
s
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Drilling down, we could hypothesize
that engagement for these leading
retailers is a function of post
frequency. However, we see that both
Macy’s and Nordstrom post frequency
is below the industry average of 1.7
per day. We can quickly learn that they
exclusively post photos and generate
a disproportionately high level of
engagement per post versus Best Buy
and other retailers.
Brand Posts Per Day
Best Buy
1.8
Macy’s
1.3
Nordstrom
1.5
Kohl’s
2.2
Toys “R” Us
1.1
JCPenny
1.2
Sears
3
Staples
2.1
Gap
1.3
Costco
1.3
Type Comparison: Engagement on Brand Tweets (size of bubble = number of posts)
Engagement per post
Links
Photos
16K
Status
Videos
Other
14K
12K
10K
8K
6K
4K
2K
co
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Co
ap
G
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ap
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ar
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From here, a qualitative assessment of the content being posted can give
more direction. Looking at a list of the top posts across retailers in January,
we can see that Nordstrom and Macy’s again rose to the top.
Top Post on Competitor Pages
Post Content
Type
Engagement
Likes
Comments
Shares
Engagement
per 10k fans
Eng compared to
Brand Avg.
Nordstrom
Like mother, like daughter.
http://bit.ly/1fnl5wi
Photo
156,008
147,941
2,085
5,982
638.9
18.3x
Macy’s
A spring fling in January?
We’re crushing on
Laura Mercier Cosmetics
hot new hues!
http://mcys.co/1dwcaa9
Photo
71,212
69,980
326
906
51.3
5.5x
Macy’s
Our Big Game checklist:
wings, nachos, Super Bowl
XLVIII gear. What else do
we need?
http://mcys.co/1la4ZuU
Photo
67,712
65,292
574
1,846
48.7
5.3x
Nordstrom
Be the buyer: what pair of
TOMS should our buyers
pick? 1, 2 or 3?
Photo
57,513
32,050
23,929
1,534
235.5
6.7x
Fan Page
Photo
The posts all have a slightly different approach, but you can see some of
the tactics used with a quick scan of these posts:
• Asking fans to answer questions (3 out of the top 4)
• Timing around big events (e.g. Super Bowl)
• Short, catchy copy with attractive photos
• Product links along with photos
• Use of link shorteners to conserve space and make
posts more readable
When you continue this analysis across a larger set of data or broader group
of competitors, additional commonalities and differences quickly emerge.
This analysis by itself may not be ground-breaking, but doing this kind of
competitive assessment and comparison over time will highlight what is
working for competitors and help inform your Facebook strategy.
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COMPETITIVE INSIGHTS
Competitive Insights are ways you can take action on all this data to stand
out from your competitors. The really juicy insights might not be there every
day or week, but will emerge over a longer period of time as you benchmark
and analyze Facebook data at a regular cadence. Let’s consider a few
questions we might answer, using our retail examples.
Ongoing analysis of user posts about competitors can answer:
• The specific products users are asking competitors about. Can we
promote our own products in this area to stand out?
• Customer service issues our competitors are having. Can we highlight our
best-in-class service as a differentiator?
• The sentiment around specific topics and campaigns. Can we tap into the
areas of interest for competitor fans?
• The response to promoted activities. How will our fans respond to
different types of paid content?
Ongoing analysis of competitor posts can help answer:
• The overall approach competitors are taking with Facebook strategy.
What should we emulate? What should we avoid?
• The specific tactics our competitors are using on Facebook. What should
we test on our own page in terms of content frequency, structure, type,
message, and timing?
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When it comes to putting these insights to work, testing and experimentation
is key. Three things can help turn your insight into effective experimentation
that ultimately becomes part of your strategy:
1. Make sure that your insight can be translated into a test.
Insights are based on data, but involve a lot of intuition.
The only way to prove them is to test.
2. Insight should be constructed as a hypothesis that can be
validated or invalidated. For example, Macy’s use of pictures
drives better engagement per post pictures in posts drive
higher engagement per post we should post more photos.
3. Beware of confirmation bias when you analyze the data
(only seeing facts that reaffirm your hypothesis). It might
lead you in the wrong direction. Avoid this by dedicating
someone to try to debunk your findings.
CONCLUSION & GETTING STARTED
Facebook, and social media in general, provides a level of competitive insight
traditional marketers could only dream about. There is a massive opportunity
to use this data to analyze your competitors and inform your strategy.
Steps to get started:
1. Pick the competitors you want to benchmark against.
2. Define your KPIs.
3. Set a regular cadence for benchmarking and deeper dives.
4. Pick the right tools and processes to collect, understand,
and share your data.
5. Dominate the competition :)
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