Have You Set Up Your Facebook Pages to Watch?

Ever wonder what your partners, competitors or market leaders are doing well on Facebook? Guess what? Facebook has you covered!

You can actually set up “Pages to Watch” and then track both their weekly progress and their top posts of the week. If you haven’t already set up this functionality, fear not—it’s easy!

First go to your Facebook brand page (you might call it a business page). Then at the top menu, go to your insights.

In the left-hand menu, you will be in Overview by default. This section will give you top-line info on your page, show you analytics for your most recent five posts and, if you scroll down, allow you to watch any pages you have setup to watch.

Bear in mind that Facebook offers these free tools (and MANY others) on a tiered system. Your page must have at least 35 likes in order for you to access your insights in the first place and it must have at least 100 likes to unlock the pages to watch feature. So if you don’t see these options, fret not. You’ll get there! And when you do, you have plenty of great new tools to look forward to.

Assuming you can see “Add Pages,” type in a page and select “+Watch Page.”

Once selected, it will show up in your Pages to Watch section.

Right off the bat, you’ll see the pages total page likes, their percent change from last week, how many posts they did this week and their engagement this week.

If you click on them within your list, you’ll get a list of their most popular posts from this week.

It’s worth pointing out, none of the information you are seeing in this section is private. You could see all of this by heading to their page and looking through their posts, seeing their comments, shares and reactions and tracking their page like growth on your own. But if you have many competitors, it can be a lot of trouble to keep up with all of them.

This functionality puts every page you want to follow in one easy-to-access place and shows you their weekly growth and engagement. And Facebook will include you in the list, so you can see how your own page compares.

As far as seeing their top content of the week, while this too is nothing private or hidden, it is a good practice to see what is working well for others in your field. There won’t be any state secrets revealed, but it will help you see what is getting people excited in your field on any given week.

So set yours up, and share anything interesting or exciting you learn in the comments, or on social. Follow and chat with us on Facebook and Twitter.

Happy page-watching!