How To Benchmark Your Page Against Your Facebook Competitors

As Facebook becomes more and more important as a marketing channel for nearly every B2C and B2B brand around the world, people start tracking their performance on the biggest social network. Most of the time the Facebook Insights are used to see how things are going and what could be improved. But what only a small minority of the brands do is benchmarking their performance against Facebook competitors. The opportunities arising out of this are really great as this gives you another way of checking if you are doing a good job or not. We want to touch a few points covering why benchmarking your performance should make a lot of sense for everyone.

Compare Your Numbers Against Your Competition

The easiest thing you can do is just compare your own numbers against others. Take metrics and KPIs like the fan count, people talking about this, interaction rate or fan growth rate and check how good you are doing compared to your peers. It really opens your eyes if you can see how specific posts are working for different brands. This also gives you the chance to avoid a lot of mistakes others made, so you can concentrate on what is actually working.

Differentiate Campaign Performance From General Market Behaviors

The next very important point is to differentiate your own campaign performance from general market movements. You will be surprised when you look for example at the fan growth rate of several brands in the same industry. Very often you will see a parallel movement of the numbers which are dependent on general facts like holidays, trade fairs etc. So in some cases you may think that your campaign was a great success, but if you look at your Facebook competitors you will quickly see that actually the changes in numbers haven’t come from your campaign but from overall market effects.

Use The Data Of Your Facebook Competitors To Justify Social Media Budgets And Drive Awareness

Especially in bigger companies it is very tough to get budgets for social media when you cannot show the return on invest (ROI) of your activities. Competitor tracking helps a lot here as you get an additional angle to show to your management. If your two competitors are already doing a lot of Facebook marketing and you can show that with facts to your boss, it may get a lot easier to convince him/her about the importance of social media marketing.

As you can see, the value from tracking and benchmarking your Facebook statistics against others is immense. What do you think? Do you already benchmark yourself against your Facebook competitors? What were the biggest eye openers for you?