Whatever business you may be in, you will have competitors – and we’ve all heard that a little competition is healthy. What’s even healthier is staying ahead of your competitors especially with your Facebook Ads. Since your competitors are likely to have the same profile of customers that you’d like to find, one excellent targeting tactic for finding quality customers in your Facebook Ads is to reach people they’re already targeting or use similar strategies.
With Facebook’s Audience Insights tool, you can go beyond high-level demographics (location, age, gender, etc.) and identify the specific interests, websites, publications, and content topics that your current customers (and similar customers) consume and share. Facebook Insights is one of the most powerful social media marketing analytics tools available today.
What is Facebook Insights?
Facebook Audience Insights is a research tool on Facebook that gives you information about two groups of people – people connected to your Page and people on Facebook. It helps to gather the information needed to develop buyer personas, keep an eye on your competitors, and discover where your target audiences consume content and what content resonates the most with them.
How do Facebook Insights help target the Competitor’s Fans?
In the eCommerce world, with competition (enemy) in every niche, the only way to overcome your competitors is by watching over them closely. That is where Facebook Audience Insights can assist you.
How to Check Out Your Competitors with Facebook Insights
Facebook knows much more about your/other’s audience than you could ever imagine. Using Facebook tools like Facebook Insights will help you attain your rival’s customers and get ideas from those strategies.
- Identify your Competition
Ask yourself, who are the big players in the space? In case you are unsure about the competition the first step would be to identify that. For that search on Google with the search query: Your Business + Facebook Page. Now go to Facebook Audience Insights and write the name of the competitor in the interest box.
Check out where your competitors are consuming information that is relevant to them; websites they frequent, magazines they read, Pages they visit on Facebook, companies they follow, athletes they admire, etc. What kind of topics and interests resonate with them regularly.
- Information Study
After keying the name of the page in the interest box, you get access to the complete information available to the audience. So one look at the demographics you come to know about the target audience it caters to. There are several data-points available to measure — such as Likes, engagement, reach, and demographics.
Take a moment to evaluate the information. How does it compare to your initial assumptions or previous research from other channels? Is it the same? Is it different? As we look at the information available to us in the Audience Insights Tool, the basis of our competitor research is to understand who the major players are and what type of content they are using on Facebook to engage their audiences.
Evaluate pages the different fans have liked. This would help in strategizing the business-scaling plan.
- Affinity Score
The Affinity Score gives us the relevant target audience in percentage terms. It reveals a more in-depth insight into the audience that is more likely to become your customer. It further guides you with what you need to put into your marketing efforts for the audience of these pages, or rather the audience of your competitors, to convert them into your potential customers.
So now that you know who your competitors are; all you need to do is have a keen analysis of their pages’ activities, time of posting, and type of content – the content that gets the most engagement – to get inspiration for your business functions.
Certain key points you must revisit in your strategy to win away competitor’s fans could be:
- What kind of content is the competitor’s publishing and in what format (posts, video, reviews)?
- Which topics and content resonates most with their Fans and receives the most Likes and Comments?
- What types of content are getting the most views and engagement?
You can now use these insights to start developing your content marketing ideas that incorporate your unique value propositions, messaging, and tactics for optimizing your campaigns. Get going now!
