How to Steal Your Competitor’s Facebook Traffic
Facebook is the third most trafficked website on the web. The users are engaged and they love to devour content. It’s also one of the most reliable places to find qualified new users. However, when you are just starting, Facebook can be rather difficult to build a quality audience or user base.
So, where do you begin? The easiest place to get started is to research your competitors and target their audience. If your potential customers have an interest in a competing or similar product/service, why wouldn’t those same users be interested in yours?
HERE’S HOW YOU CAN START CAPTURING YOUR COMPETITOR’S FACEBOOK TRAFFIC AND BUILD YOUR OWN TARGETED AUDIENCE:
STEP 1. FIND OUT WHAT YOUR COMPETITOR’S FANS ENGAGE WITH
To get started, you’ll want to analyze your competition’s Facebook page content. This will enable you to see what type of content they engage with and when are the best days and times to connect with them. Let’s say, for the purpose of this blog post, Moz was a competitor of Growth School , and I was attempting to steal their Facebook audience.
The initial thing you want to do is go to Fanpage Karma and run Moz’s Facebook fan page URL.
Shown in the image above, the first thing you will see from this free tool is the basic stats of Moz’s Facebook fan page. The information covers everything from the number of fans Moz has to their engagement ratio.
What you must do is begin investigating a bit deeper to get an understanding of the types of posts that are attracting these fans as well as generating their engagement. You can do this by first looking at the engagement per daytime graph.
As you can see from the image above, Moz’s most engaging days to post are on Mondays and Fridays. This means if you are going after Moz’s users and fans on Facebook, you would also want the majority of your posts to be on Mondays and Fridays. This will generate more views, likes, shares, comments, and new fans.
You should also look at the length and types of post that produce the most engagement. Moz uses images, videos, and links. But their image posts seem to do the best.
This should be a pretty good indicator that you want to be posting pictures, considering you are attempting to attract Moz’s customers and fans.
The next thing you should do is look deeper into the similarities of the most engaged posts. Understanding character length, post type and time of the week to post is great, but there are more things to consider. Something I noticed about Moz is that their best posts always offered to teach something. The images that they used for those posts almost always had a large photo of either Rand Fishkin or another gentleman in an unusual position. If you are after Moz’s fans, you will want to do the same. Replicate the posts that experienced high engagement.
The final portion of the Facebook fan page analysis is to determine who the top influencers are.
Luckily, Fanpage Karma gives us this information with a single click. They provide the number of likes, shares, and comments each influencer performed. From there, you can see similar pages that influencer is connected to that has fans just like the ones Moz has.(Seen above)
STEP 2. FIND YOUR COMPETITORS BEST PERFORMING ADS AND LANDING PAGES
Now it’s time to start looking for Moz’s ads and boosted posts. In the past, you would have to like Moz’s Fanpage and visit their site in an effort to get advertised to. This can be difficult because more likely than not multiple companies will be targeting you and you may end up be not being served or you might miss Moz’s ads. If you do get Moz to advertise to you then you would screen capture the ads and add them to your own repositories like Dropbox or Google Drive. Then Facebook released the Facebook adboard where you could go and view all of the ads that had been shown to you. The Facebook adboard didn’t last long before Facebook put it to death.
Fortunately, Compass gives us all of this information and more. They are similar to SEMRush or WhatRunsWhere, but for social ads. Offering a searchable database for you to see all of your competitors past and current ads. Performance indicators are shown in the form of ad age, the amount of likes, shares, and comments.
Login to Compass and Run a page search for Moz. As you can see above, Compass has indexed Moz as a page and has 9 of their ads indexed. It gives some basic information about how many likes the page has and the number of people talking about Moz. Talking about is a pretty meaningful signal of a great page to analyze. A lot of people misinterpret it as being the total number of social mentions on Facebook when in fact it is showing the number of engagements the page is experiencing. If your competitors have a sizable amount of people “talking about” them, then it means they are probably boosting a few posts, and you need to start collecting those promoted posts.
Now that we have found Moz, we can view all of their ads and promoted posts within their Compass Page. The ads are ordered by age, but you can quickly see which ads have the most engagement and view landing pages associated with them. In the image above, you can see that their best performing ad is young and has 53 “likes”, 12 comments, and two shares. It is a boosted post, and it takes you to their standard landing page. There are a few posts and ads that have significant engagement that I would want to try, so what I will do is bookmark these ads in Compass and follow the page so that I can get alerts to any new ads that get indexed in the future.
The next piece is developing corresponding landing pages for those ads. Compass offers the ability to see the past and present landing pages that were used for each ad or post. It can be a bit complicated replicating a landing page, but if you have a developer on your team who has the time to do it, then you are golden. If you don’t, its time to get yourself a landing page building tool. There are several on the market and they can make life much easier for a marketer or entrepreneur. For this example, I will use Instapage.
Instapage offers a URL Importer that allows me to copy any landing page in minutes. For instance, I have that Moz landing page that I want to copy and repurpose for my competing product. The process is very simple and in total will only take me about 10 minutes total with copy edits.
All I have to do is copy the Moz landing page URL and go into Instapage, click “Create New Page” and select the URL Importer. It will take about 2mins for Instapage to finish. Once it is ready, you have an exact replica of your competitors landing page. What’s left is to customize the page with my color pallet, copy, and logos.
3. TIME TO PUT IT ALL TOGETHER
Now that you have done your analysis and competitive ad intelligence, it is time to start replicating those successful posts, ads, and landing pages. Targeting your competitors is often pretty easy, especially if they are a brand like Moz. Targeting both men and women with an interest in Moz who live in the U.S. and are from the ages of 18–40 gives me a potential reach of 110,000 people. That’s a nice size target, and they will probably convert pretty well with my campaign. The targeting doesn’t stop there, remember that Facebook Fanpage analysis we did earlier?
I targeted people who have an interest in Moz, but you can do much more than that. Looking back at my fanpage analysis we saw a few things that could make our targeting better. Some of Moz’s most active fans had similar Fanpages or work for SEO agencies. This means I can target people with an interest in those similar Fanpages or SEO agencies. Lastly, I can target the people who work for those SEO Agencies, which is a much stronger and targeted tactic. Now that you have a well-tuned strategy, you can start to steal your competitors traffic.
CONCLUSION
Stealing your competitor’s Facebook traffic can be difficult if you don’t know what you are doing and don’t know about the tools that you need to make the process possible. Facebook makes it hard to reach a competitors audience organically without spending a bit of money on Facebook ads. To be successful on Facebook it doesn’t cost much, but paying a couple hundred bucks goes a long way as it helps to build momentum and get targeted traffic.
Nonetheless, whether you have money to spend or not, you should be able to steal your competitor’s fans effectively if you follow these steps. Just don’t concentrate on a pure number of more fans as this isn’t necessarily better. Rather, you should try to get as many engaged fans as possible. Especially, since the higher engaging fans, tend to pay for products.
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This content was originally posted on RandOwens.com
