2. 2
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:
COMPETITIVE
BENCHMARKS
Key Question
How do I stack up to competitors
across my social KPIs & metrics?
Quantitative
Qualitative
Quantitative
&
Qualitative
What actions can I take to stand
out from the competition?
What are my competitors doing on
Facebook? Which strategies and
tactics work for them?
Type of Analysis
COMPETITIVE
ANALYSIS
COMPETITIVE
INSIGHTS
3. 3
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 Industry Benchmark Industry Leader
Best Buy Total W/W Change Industry Average BB vs. Avg. Macy’s Total BB vs. Leader
Audience
Total Fans 6,924,505 5.0% 5,219,036 133% 13,985,263 50%
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%
Engagement
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%
Content
Brand Posts Per Day 1.8 7% 1.7 109 1.3 140
User Posts Per Day 62 1% 35 177% 26 241%
Responsiveness
Response Rate 85% -2% 48% 177% 63% 135%
Responses Per Day 53 5% 12 433% 16 326%
Contact the Simply Measured Account Services team
to learn about custom competitive scorecards like this
for all your social media channels.
4. 4
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
600K
500K
400K
300K
200K
100K
0
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
Total Engagement
TotalEngagement
Engagement as % of Fans
Best Buy
54K
.8%
51K
.9% 36K
3.3%
514K
3.7%
401K
16.7%
195K
1.8%
95K
2.4%
72K
2.3%
57K
5.5%
97K
2.1%
Macy’s
Nordstrom
Kohl’s
Toys “R” Us
JCPenny
Sears
Staples
Gap
Costco
5. 55
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
1.3Macy’s
1.3Gap
1.3Costco
1.5Nordstrom
2.2Kohl’s
1.1Toys “R” Us
1.2JCPenny
3Sears
2.1Staples
Type Comparison: Engagement on Brand Tweets (size of bubble = number of posts)
Photos Videos OtherLinks Status
16K
14K
12K
10K
8K
6K
4K
2K
0
BestBuy
M
acy’s
N
ordstrom
Kohl’s
Toys
“R”Us
JCPenny
Sears
Staples
G
ap
Costco
Engagementperpost
6. 6
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.
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.
Top Post on Competitor Pages
Fan Page Photo 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
7. 7
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?
8. 8
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 :)
