HOW TO USE FACEBOOK DATA TO ANALYZE YOUR COMPETITORS

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1 HOW TO USE FACEBOOK DATA TO ANALYZE YOUR COMPETITORS

2 HOW TO USE FACEBOOK DATA TO ANALYZE YOUR COMPETITORS Imagine a world where you have access to your competitors Omniture databases, 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 COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS COMPETITIVE INSIGHTS Key Question How do I stack up to competitors across my social KPIs & metrics? What are my competitors doing on Facebook? Which strategies and tactics work for them? What actions can I take to stand out from the competition? Type of Analysis Quantitative Quantitative & Qualitative Qualitative 2

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, % 5,219, % 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 % 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% User Posts Per Day 62 1% % % Responsiveness Response Rate 85% -2% 48% 177% 63% 135% Responses Per Day 53 5% % % Contact the Simply Measured Account Services team to learn about custom competitive scorecards like this for all your social media channels. 3

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 rivaling Macy s on total engagement and achieving a much higher engagement rate per fan. Fan Page Comparison: Total Engagement on Brand Posts 600K Total Engagement Engagement as % of Fans 20% Total Engagement 500K 400K 300K 200K 100K 54K.8% 514K 3.7% 401K 16.7% 195K 1.8% 95K 2.4% 97K 2.1% 72K 2.3% 57K 5.5% 51K.9% 36K 3.3% 15% 10% 5% 0 0% Best Buy Macy s Kohl s Toys R Us JCPenny Sears Staples Gap Costco 4

5 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 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 Macy s Kohl s 2.2 Toys R Us 1.1 JCPenny 1.2 Sears 3 Staples 2.1 Gap 1.3 Costco 1.3 Type Comparison: Engagement on Brand Tweets (size of bubble = number of posts) Engagement per post 16K 14K 12K 10K 8K 6K 4K 2K 0 Photos Links Status Videos Other Best Buy Macy s Kohl s Toys R Us JCPenny Sears Staples Gap Costco 5

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 and Macy s again rose to the top. Top Post on Competitor Pages Fan Page Photo Post Content Type Engagement Likes Comments Shares Engagement per 10k fans Eng compared to Brand Avg. Like mother, like daughter. Photo 156, ,941 2,085 5, x Macy s A spring fling in January? We re crushing on Laura Mercier Cosmetics hot new hues! Photo 71,212 69, x Macy s Our Big Game checklist: wings, nachos, Super Bowl XLVIII gear. What else do we need? Photo 67,712 65, , x Be the buyer: what pair of TOMS should our buyers pick? 1, 2 or 3? Photo 57,513 32,050 23,929 1, x 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. 6

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? 7

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 :) 8

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