How to Track Competitors’ Promoted Posts on Facebook

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Are you struggling to increase ROI from your promoted posts on Facebook? If so, you’re not alone.

Easy conversions from Facebook are no longer a given. Marketers now need to put more time and money behind their content to get results.

But are you putting money behind the right content, or just inflating costs via a bidding war with your competitors?

The only way to identify unique opportunities for your brand and differentiate your promoted content to is know what your competitors are promoting on Facebook.

Tracking promoted posts on Facebook by competitors, thought leaders, and influencers helps you leverage your brand’s competitive advantage and incorporate insights from others’ success into your social media strategy.

Why smart spending is crucial on Facebook

Facebook needs to keep users engaged, and make money in the process. So they aren’t just charging for advertising; they are actually forcing brands to pay to get their content in or at the top of user feeds at all.

This pay gate for brands is designed to keep users’ Facebook feeds relatively light on branded content, which helps keep users from jumping ship. It also allows the platform to charge premium rates for increased impressions.

Now, only viral organic branded content — if any at all — is destined for the top of the news feed. To get impressions and engagement, brands must invest in promoted posts on Facebook.

This puts even more pressure on marketers.

Why? Because underperforming organic content has major opportunity costs. But underperforming promoted and boosted posts wastes advertising spend on top of that opportunity cost.

That’s the difference between organic and paid content that flops: one is sadly ineffective, the other is just plain reckless.

Tracking promoted posts on Facebook

To rise above wasteful and ineffective content plays, marketers have to be more confident than ever in content decisions. And that means you need insight based on data, not your guts.

You can’t be left guessing if the engagement you see on posts by competitors is buoyed by paid promotion (or not). Because when left in the dark about promoted versus organic posts, it is far too easy to draw the wrong conclusions about the topics and campaigns you should put your limited resources behind.

That’s why TrackMaven has the ability to track Facebook promoted posts. You can see which content is promoted and which is not — for your brand’s posts, and for posts by your competitors, influencers, and any brand or individual you want to monitor in TrackMaven.

Why TrackMaven’s promoted post detection is extraordinary

TrackMaven uses advanced machine learning to predict whether a Facebook post is promoted or not. This cutting-edge technology quickly adapts to algorithmic changes and analyzes your competitors’ post performance over time. Rest assured that your brand’s data remains private and anonymized.

In TrackMaven, you can filter your feed of competitor content to include, or exclude, promoted content, and compare the performance of promoted content versus organic content. These insights give you a strategic edge over the competition and add critical depth to your competitive analysis.

For example, when we promoted our Social Media Inflation Infographic on Facebook, we saw three times our average impact score as a result (promoted content is labeled with a dollar sign):

There are many ways to use TrackMaven’s Facebook promoted posts detection. You will be able to:

  • Easily see whether a post in your competitive landscape is promoted or organic.
  • Identify the most engaging organic content topics (for your own brand, as well as for competitors and influencers) that are the best candidates for paid promotion.
  • Understand how much content your competitors are promoting on Facebook.
  • Graph, analyze, and track promoted and organic post data alongside other Facebook analytics in reports and dashboards.

Want to start tracking promoted posts on Facebook? Request a free, custom demo of TrackMaven’s marketing analytics platform now!

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