Last summer, I was completely enraptured with the Olympics. I’m not sure why because my athletic ability does not measure close to any of the olympians closely resembling a clumsy toddler learning how to walk instead. And I wouldn’t consider myself a sports fan, unless you count eating as a sport.
Yet, I was glued to NBC from watching Gabby Douglas soar through the air to Serena Williams slamming the tennis balls.
But it was swimming that drummed up much excitement for me. I swam in high school and chose to stop past that to focus more on my desired “college experience.” Regardless, with Michael Phelps swimming his last races and Missy Franklin completely dominating as a youngster, I was hooked.
It was thrilling to see these swimmers power through the water, some completely annihilating their competition. Yet, I was at the edge of my seat for one race — Men’s 4x100m relay.
Majority of the race the Americans dominated and at the last leg with Ryan Lochte had a solid lead. Then, all of a sudden…the French gained speed and out-touched Lochte at the finish.
You’ve got your strategy set, customers are happy and your product is functioning well— you’re in the clear to run through the finish line in first place. Wait. A competitor just came out of no where.
Even though the American were favored to win, the French came up out of no where to secure the gold. Just like the French, your competitors can come up and secure your customers without you noticing. Keeping tabs on them is a nice cushion to make sure it isn’t happening.
With the updates made on Facebook daily, it can kind of be hard to look at competitors constantly, especially when you have your own work to do. However, like mentioned above the small tabs to you can keep on your competitors to compare your own roadmaps of Facebook to theirs.
I created this spreadsheet for you to do just that. Looking at Page Likes, People talking about the pages to observing the numbers of one page post can help you display exactly what your competitors are doing while looking at the averages to determine a path you should head into for your own Facebook page.
Facebook is an extremely valuable marketing tool. With visuals, text, ads, and interaction, it can be a source of some good leads for you. Facebook strategy doesn’t just involve your own content though, you are competing with your own competitors as well with EdgeRank.
EdgeRank is the formula that Facebook uses in order to determine who will be reading all of those posts that will make the cut onto a user’s Facebook news feed. With over 1 billion people using Facebook and 42 million pages, there’s already a lot of competition that goes into what user will see your content — only about 17% of users will see your content.
With the time decay, affinity for a page/user, weight between the interaction, there’s a clear need for you to look at not only what you are doing on Facebook, but also what your competitors are doing as well.
I created this spreadsheet to outline clearly the interactions on the Facebook Pages of your competitors in order to help see how your competitors are stacking up because you don’t want them to come out to steal the gold from you.
So breaking down this spreadsheet. I took a sample of 5 fast food companies — KFC, McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s.
First, I looked at each page for the number of Page Likes and then the number of People Talking about each page. As soon as you insert numbers in with the pool of competitors you are gathering from you’ll be able to see the average of the page likes and people talking about the page. It will give you a benchmark showing the quantity of page likes and interaction your competitors have.
Second, I scanned the page to see how many posts each page posted per day. I just looked at one day, but as mentioned about time decay is a factor in EdgeRank. So, if your competitors are posting 1 to 15 times a day you can plug it into the spreadsheet to see the average.
Lastly, I took one post out of each of the competitors’ page and broke it down. Number of likes on a post, comments on a post, the number of people who shared it, number of characters in the text and the time of day all show what is going on with the posts. Adding in each of the numbers for the different columns will also bring you to the average of the individual terms listed above from your competitors.
All of the columns are then averaged out to the side, so when you input the numbers in to the columns the averages will show up on the side. In my example it’s shown on the bottom though.
Seeing the averages and benchmarks set by your competitors could in fact be scary because yours do not measure up or fun because you are in fact crushing them.
However, let’s dive even further for some even more interesting things.
Besides the averages being determined, there are several other correlations that can be determined from looking at these numbers on the spreadsheet.
You can look at the time of day affects the number of likes, comments or shares. Also, you can see if the number of characters with the text has any affect on the number of likes, comments or shares it gets.
Here’s an example of a correlation between the # of shares a post gets vs. the # of characters the post has.
It seems that there is a slight relationship with the # of shares a post gets vs. the # of characters the post has. Taco Bell with a post length of 25 characters had over 321 shares.
Some other examples you can use:
# of Likes vs. # of Shares
Time of Day vs. # of Likes
Time of Day vs. # of Likes
Page Likes vs.# of Post Likes
# People Talking vs. # of Comments on Post
There are lots of correlations you can create with this Competitive Intelligence Facebook Spreadsheet! <—Download it there!
In my example I only took a sample for one day; however, in the template I’m sharing there is space to do a whole working week or 5 days.
Maven really enjoys digging up a bunch of data on your competitors too. ;)
Let me know what you think! Tweet at Maven (@TrackMavenApp) or me (@sabelharris)! You also can comment on our Facebook page too!