How to Target Competitors' Audience on Facebook

Stealing your competitors' customers sounds aggressive, but on Facebook, it's just smart marketing. Your competitors have already done the hard work of building an audience that is interested in products or services just like yours. This guide breaks down exactly how you can get your brand, message, and ads in front of that highly-qualified audience.

First Things First: Deeply Understand Your Competitor's Audience

Before you spend a single dollar on ads, you need to become an expert on who you're targeting. Simply targeting the "followers of Brand X" isn't enough. You need to understand why they follow Brand X. This intelligence gathering will be the foundation for everything you do next - from your ad creative to your targeting layers.

Start by doing some manual reconnaissance:

• Analyze their top-performing content. Go to your competitor's Facebook Page. What types of posts get the most comments, shares, and reactions? Are they funny memes, inspiring tutorials, user-generated content, or behind-the-scenes videos? This tells you what their audience values.
• Read the comments sections. The comments are a goldmine of information. What language do people use? What questions do they ask? More importantly, what are they complaining about? If you see recurring complaints about shipping times, customer service, or a specific product flaw, you've just found a powerful angle for your own advertising.
• Identify their audience's pain points. Based on their content and the community's feedback, you can start building a profile. Are they looking for affordability? Premium quality? Exceptional customer support? Faster delivery? Convenience? Knowing their key decision-making factor is your ticket in.

Your goal is to be able to finish this sentence: "People follow [Competitor's Name] because they want __________, but they are often frustrated by __________." Your product can now become the perfect solution.

Method 1: Direct Interest Targeting in Facebook Ads

This is the most straightforward way to begin. Facebook’s Ad Manager allows you to target users based on interests they've expressed, which often includes major brands, publications, and public figures within your industry.

It's your first stop for a reason: it's quick to set up and allows you to test the waters. Here's how to do it.

Step-by-Step Guide to Interest Targeting:

1. Navigate to Facebook Ads Manager and create a new campaign.
2. At the Ad Set level, find the “Detailed Targeting” section.
3. In the search box, start typing the name of your competitor. If they have a large enough following and presence on the platform, their brand name will appear as a targetable interest.
4. Select them from the list. You can add several competitors to the same ad set to broaden your reach.

A Quick Reality Check: Not every brand is a targetable interest. Facebook’s criteria aren't public, but it's usually reserved for larger, more established pages. If your direct competitor is a local small business, they probably won't show up. In that case, don't worry - you'll need to use the more creative methods below.

How to Take Interest Targeting Further:

Don't just target the competitor's name. Think bigger. Ask yourself: what other pages, magazines, influencers, or tools would their ideal customer also follow?

• If you sell high-end running shoes, your competitor is Nike. But you can also target interests like Runner’s World magazine, Strava, and famous marathon runners.
• If you own a SaaS company selling project management software, your competitor is Asana. But you can also target interests like Fast Company, public figures like Seth Godin, or job titles like "Project Manager."

Layering these related interests helps you build a more robust audience profile, capturing people who have the exact mindset and needs for your product.

Method 2: Use Strategic Content and Copy to “Call Out” the Audience

This is where your initial research pays off. Instead of just targeting users and showing them a generic ad, you are going to create content that speaks directly to their experience as a customer of your competitor.

Let's say you're a modern social media tool, and you identified that users of older tools are constantly frustrated by disconnected accounts and poor video support. You would target broad interests like "Social Media Marketing," but your ad creative makes the connection for you:

• Ad Headline: "Tired of reconnecting your accounts every week?"
• Ad Copy: "Your social media tool should just work. We designed ours for today's content - think glitch-free short-form video scheduling and accounts that actually stay connected. Stop fighting your software and find out why teams are switching."

See what happened there? You didn't even need to have the competitor as a targetable "interest." The ad copy itself does the targeting by zeroing in on a known pain point. Only someone experiencing that problem will feel like the ad is speaking directly to them. This approach works because Facebook's algorithm is incredibly smart. It will initially show the ad to a slice of your broad audience, and when it sees people who have that specific pain point clicking and engaging, it will learn to find more people just like them.

Method 3: Layering Targeting to Find Hyper-Relevant Users

Layering allows you to get much more specific than just targeting one broad interest. In the Detailed Targeting section, you can use "AND" and "Exclude" logic to narrow your audience. This helps filter out irrelevant people and focus your budget on users who are most likely to convert.

How Layering Works: The "AND" Function

Let’s say you sell vegan, cruelty-free cosmetics. Your main competitor is a large brand like Fenty Beauty. Targeting their followers is great, but that audience includes plenty of people who don't specifically care about vegan products.

Here’s how you'd layer it:

1. Initial Audience: People who have an Interest in "Fenty Beauty."
2. Layer 1 (Must also match): Define further and add Interests like "Veganism," "Cruelty-free," or "Vegan cosmetics."

Now, instead of targeting every Fenty Beauty fan, you’re only targeting the ones who are also interested in the specific values your brand represents. It's a much smaller, but far more qualified, audience.

Method 4: The Power of Lookalike Audiences from Video Views

This is an advanced - and incredibly effective - strategy that works even if your competitors are not targetable interests. A Lookalike Audience is an audience that Facebook builds for you, composed of users who share traits with a "source" or "seed" audience that you provide. Essentially, you show Facebook who your ideal customer is, and Facebook goes out and finds more people just like them.

Our source audience will be people who watched your videos. Here's a two-step plan to make it work:

Step 1: Get Your "Seed" Audience

You can't upload your competitor's customer list, but you can create an audience of their followers who have shown interest in your brand.

1. Create a short-form video Reel or Story. The content should highlight your solution to a competitor's pain point (from your research in phase one). For example, a 15-second video showing how much easier your software is to use.
2. Run a Video Views ad campaign. Target this video to the interests of your competitor(s) or related high-level interests you identified earlier. Let this ad run for a week or two, spending a modest budget, until it gets a few thousand views.
3. Create a Custom Audience. Go to the "Audiences" section of Ads Manager. Select "Create a Custom Audience" > "Video." Now, create an audience of people who watched at least 50% (or even 75%) of that specific video ad.

You now have a "seed" audience - a list of high-intent people from your competitor’s sphere of influence who were engaged enough to watch a significant portion of your video.

Step 2: Create the Lookalike Audience

1. Back in "Audiences," select your new Video Views custom audience.
2. Click "Create Lookalike."
3. Select your target country or region. You can start with a 1% Lookalike - this gives you the closest match to your seed audience.

After a few hours, Facebook will have generated a massive new audience for you (often over a million people) that mirrors the behavior and demographics of the competitor's followers who showed the most interest in what makes you different. You can now run a new conversion campaign targeting this powerful Lookalike Audience.

Final Thoughts

Targeting your competitor's audience on Facebook blends clever ad setup with smart, empathetic content. It’s not just about pushing your products in front of them, it's about understanding their frustrations and presenting your brand as the perfect solution. By combining direct interest targeting, pain-point-focused ad copy, and the powerful reach of Lookalike Audiences, you can effectively and ethically capture customers who are ready for a change.

As you work to win over these new audiences with awesome Reels, Stories, and timely posts, consistency is everything. In our experience, juggling multiple platforms and keeping up with engagement can derail even the best strategies. At Postbase, we built our platform precisely to eliminate that planning and scheduling chaos. With a visual calendar, a unified inbox for comments and DMs, and built-in analytics, we make it simple to manage your content so you can focus on creating the kind of engaging posts that pull customers away from your competition.