How To Compare your Creative Strategy with Competitors on Facebook

Between content publishers, strategists and higher ups in your social media team, you must often get asked questions like “How did our messaging perform? What should we do next? What kind of content engages best on Facebook?”

Ideally, you would want to compare the performance of your creative strategy around holiday deals or promotions, to those of your competitors, also around holiday deals or promotions. Not to how their trivia questions performed on Facebook – for that would be like comparing apples to oranges.

Whether you have tried out a new creative strategy, or mimicked competitors – benchmarking your performance to your competitors based on the type of communication or creative content pillar you put out there is pretty important. However, as analytical minds, you also need data from the industry to back up your answers and recommendations.

With Unmetric, you can follow these steps to uncover Facebook engagement data to help you benchmark against the relevant type of content published by your competitors:

Step 1: Identify and create a competitor group within your industry.

Get started on the main Summary page by clicking on ‘Manage Groups/Brands’ to create your own competitor group. Here we have created a small group as a subset of the Retail Chain industry.

Step 2: Dive into competitor content strategy.

Jump over to the Content Strategy tab. Let’s see where Walmart directed its efforts last month.

Walmart’s creative efforts on Facebook are mostly on the subject of Walmart itself. Now let’s compare that with Target.

While Target publishes way fewer Facebook posts, the retail chain appears to have a ‘brand based’ creative approach similar to Walmart’s.

Step 3: Discover competitor effort vs. engagement.

Now we need to dive a little deeper to understand the particular type of creative effort driving these engagement numbers.

It looks like Walmart’s store specific updates make up a chunk of the brand’s creative strategy while racking up an engagement score of 26. Now onto Target…

Interestingly, Target also appears to have a similar creative strategy, directed by posts on store specific updates.

However, while fewer in number, Target’s store specific updates received an engagement score of 60, outperforming Walmart’s engagement by more than 50%!

This is the type of actionable data you need. Try out these steps so you can go in to that next weekly or monthly review meeting with:

• The type of creative strategy that’s working for you vs. your competitors and data on how everyone performed.
• Concrete recommendations to tweak messaging or spend.
• The exact benchmarks you can target for the next review.

Head over to the Unmetric platform to get started now.