Comparing your brand’s Facebook page to the pages of competitors is a challenge, as you are not privy to several key data points that ultimately have significant influence on the level of success. Without administrator access to a page, it is not typically possible to determine:
- How much your competition is spending on Facebook advertising
- The extent to which the competition is driving customers to Facebook via magazine ads, billboards, television campaigns, e-mail marketing newsletters, direct mail and the like
- How many post views (impressions) your competition’s posts are receiving — data that would be necessary to properly calculate engagement rate
- How many Facebook users are actively consuming news feed stories posted by your competitor (monthly active users)
If you’re analyzing your own page, the metrics to look at in general are monthly active users, post views (impressions) and engagement rate. These metrics provide a clear view of how many people are actively taking in your content and interacting with your brand. Since these metrics are inaccessible on competitors' pages — and the number of lifetime likes is not an effective measure of consumer engagement —how can one compare their page to the competition? The simple (albeit imperfect) answer is: measure the volume of daily likes and comments.
Through regression analysis of Facebook Insights data from large brand pages across multiple industries, we found a reasonable correlation (R-square varying by vertical between .5 and .75) between daily news feed impressions (visible to administrators only) and daily likes and comments (publicly accessible via manual counting on a competitor’s page). Thus, the volume of daily likes and comments is an indicator of how well a competitor is doing with daily news feed impressions. This method is not an ideal solution to the challenges posed in tracking competitors, but given the limitations of the data available to non-administrators, it is among the best alternatives.
When attempting to calculate a competitor’s engagement rate, many in the past have divided the average volume of interactions into the total lifetime likes. We argue that omitting the number of lifetime likes (formerly known as total fans) from the equation is reasonable. Brand pages have been established for years now, and Facebook users who liked a page years (or even months) ago do not frequently — if ever — interact with the page, so early likes really have little to do with today’s engagement. Brand-to-user relationships on Facebook are much more temporary and short-term than they were in the early days of Facebook, so this historical metric should not be included in competitive engagement calculations.
The need for context when measuring a brand’s Facebook page is clear, and measuring competitors is frequently a way marketers look for this context. The number of likes and comments on a brand’s status update has a direct influence on the volume of news feed impressions that will be generated, and although this metric serves as a reasonably effective measure of competitive engagement levels, a significant increase in engagement is not always indicative of a successful Facebook content strategy. At times a spike in engagement (criticism) is prompted by external factors such as a product discontinuation.
Netflix recently received 81,401 comments on a single status update when the company notified customers of a change to its pricing structure, and the majority of the response from Facebook users was predictably unfavorable. In terms of sheer volume this surpassed the number of comments on Lil Wayne’s most popular status update — illustrating that competitive analysis on Facebook requires looking up from the raw numbers and considering the context. More is not always better.