How to Track Competitors on Facebook

Watching what your competition does on Facebook isn't about stealing their ideas, it's about making your own strategy smarter, faster, and more effective. By understanding what works (and what doesn't) for your rivals, you can find opportunities to stand out and connect with your audience in a more meaningful way. This guide will walk you through a practical, step-by-step process for tracking your competitors on Facebook to find actionable insights that will sharpen your content and grow your brand.

Why Bother Tracking Competitors on Facebook?

Keeping an eye on your competitors isn’t just an act of professional curiosity - it’s a powerful source of strategic intelligence. The data you gather can directly influence your content calendar, ad campaigns, and community engagement tactics. Let’s break down the tangible benefits.

Spot Content Opportunities and Resonating Themes

Your competitors are essentially testing content ideas on your shared target audience for free. By monitoring their posts, you can quickly identify which formats, topics, and tones are generating the most buzz. Do their short-form videos get more shares than static images? Are listicles or how-to guides driving the most comments? This insight lets you skip some of the trial-and-error and create content you already know has a high chance of success.

Understand Their Audience Engagement Strategy

Pay close attention to how your competitors interact with their followers. Are they quick to respond to comments? Do they use a formal or casual tone? Do they run polls, ask questions, or use other tactics to spark conversation? Observing their community management style can reveal what their (and likely your) audience expects. You might also spot unanswered questions or pain points in their comments section - a perfect opportunity for you to create content that provides the solution.

Learn From Their Advertising Playbook

Why spend your ad budget guessing which visuals and ad copy will work when your competitors are already running public tests? By using tools like the Meta Ad Library, you can see the exact ads your competitors are running. This gives you a look into their messaging, calls-to-action (CTAs), target destinations (e.g., landing pages, product pages), and visual direction. You can learn from what seems to be working for them and find ways to differentiate your own campaigns.

Identify Gaps You Can Fill

Perhaps even more valuable than seeing what your competitors are doing is seeing what they aren't doing. Maybe they post great photos but never create video tutorials. Perhaps they run ads for products but never share behind-the-scenes content that builds brand trust. These gaps represent strategic openings. If you can fill a need or content void that your competitors are ignoring, you can capture a segment of the audience they’re overlooking.

Your Competitor Tracking Checklist: What to Monitor

To avoid getting overwhelmed, you need a clear framework for what to look for. Use this checklist to structure your analysis and ensure you're gathering the most valuable information.

1. Content Strategy & Cadence

• Publishing Frequency: How many times a day or week are they posting? Is their cadence consistent?
• Posting Times: Are they posting at specific times of the day? Do you see a pattern in when their most engaging content goes live?
• Content Formats: What's their mix of content? Analyze the ratio of images, carousels, short-form video (Reels), long-form video, links to blog posts, and text-only updates.
• Content Pillars: What are their recurring themes? Are they focusing on education, entertainment, inspiration, or promotion? Try to identify 3-5 core topics they always talk about.
• Tone of Voice: Is their brand personality witty, professional, supportive, or edgy? How does this message come through in their captions and creative?

2. Audience Engagement Metrics

• Top Performing Posts: Each week, identify their post with the highest number of likes, comments, and shares. What format was it? What was the topic?
• Engagement Rate: While you can't see their exact reach, you can get a directional sense by comparing the number of likes/comments to their total page followers. A post with 500 likes on a page with 5,000 followers is performing exceptionally well.
• Comment Sentiment: Read the comments. Are people overwhelmingly positive? Are they asking customer support questions? Are they tagging their friends? The emotional tone can tell you a lot about brand perception.
• Response Strategy: Does the brand reply to comments? If so, how quickly? Are their responses canned or personalized? Lack of engagement is another gap you can exploit.

3. Paid Advertising Strategy

• Active Campaigns: Are they currently running ads? How many distinct ads are they running?
• Ad Formats: Are they using video ads, single image ads, carousels, or collection ads?
• Offers & CTAs: What are they promoting? Are they pushing a direct sale ("Shop Now"), lead generation ("Download Free Guide"), or brand awareness ("Learn More")?
• Ad Copy & Messaging: What angles are they using in their ad copy? Are they focusing on pain points, benefits, features, or social proof (like testimonials)?
• Landing Pages: Where are their ads pointing? Click through to analyze their landing pages for messaging consistency and user experience.

How to Manually Track Competitors (The Free Method)

You don't need expensive software to get started. A bit of organization and a consistent schedule are all you need to build a powerful manual tracking system.

Step 1: Identify Your Competitors

First, create a focused list. Don't try to track 20 different pages. Start with a solid group of 3-5 competitors. Categorize them:

• Direct Competitors: These are the brands that offer a very similar product or service to a similar audience (e.g., another local coffee shop, a T-shirt brand in the same niche).
• Indirect Competitors: These businesses solve the same problem but with a different solution (e.g., for a meal kit service, an indirect competitor could be a local grocery store or a restaurant review blog).
• Aspirational Competitors: These are the leaders in your industry. You may not compete with them directly on price or scale yet, but their content strategy is one you can learn from and aspire to.

Step 2: Use Facebook's Native "Pages to Watch" Tool

Meta provides a simple, built-in tool that’s a fantastic starting point. It’s located in the "Insights" or "Benchmarking" section of your Meta Business Suite.

1. Log into your Meta Business Suite.
2. Navigate to Insights on the left-hand menu.
3. Under "Benchmarking," you'll see a section to add competitor pages.
4. Add the pages you identified in Step 1.

Once you’ve added them, Facebook will give you a high-level weekly summary, including their total page likes, how many times they posted, and their total engagement for the week. It’s not deep, but it’s great for a quick, at-a-glance comparison of top-line activity.

Step 3: Conduct a Weekly Manual Review

Set aside 30 minutes each week to visit your competitors' Facebook pages directly. Open a spreadsheet or a document to log your findings. This is where you'll capture the qualitative data that automated tools miss. Follow your checklist from the previous section and keep your notes consistent.

A simple tracking spreadsheet could look like this:


| Competitor Name | Date | Best Performing Post (Link) | Post Format | Key Takeaway | Top Topic |
------------------|-----------|------------------------------|----------------|----------------------------------------------------------|-------------------|
Competitor A | 10/26/2023| http://fb.com/post/123 | Reel | Behind-the-scenes video got 3x normal comments. Try this.| Company Culture |
Competitor B | 10/26/2023| http://fb.com/post/456 | Carousel Image | "5 Misconceptions" post resonated well. | Educational |
Competitor C | 10/26/2023| http://fb.com/post/789 | Link to Blog | Article on XYZ trend didn't get much traction. | Industry News |



Step 4: Become an Expert on the Meta Ad Library

This is the most powerful free competitor analysis tool available. The Meta Ad Library allows you to see every active ad any page is running across Meta's platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Audience Network).

How to Use It:

1. Go to the Meta Ad Library.
2. Select a country and choose the "All Ads" category.
3. In the search bar, type a competitor's name.
4. You can now see all the ads they are currently running. Pay attention to:

• The Visuals: What imagery or video are they using? Is it a polished studio shot or a user-generated-style phone video?
• The Copy: What's the headline? What's the primary text? Are they using emojis? Long or short copy?
• The CTA: Notice the text on the button (e.g., "Shop Now," "Learn More," "Sign Up").
• Variations: Look for ads that use the same image but different ad copy, or vice versa. This indicates they are actively testing to see what messaging resonates best. Take a screenshot of anything that stands out and add it to your research file.

Turning Insights Into Action

Remember, the goal of this tracking isn’t to create a perfect report - it's to find ideas that improve your own marketing. When you conduct your review each week, ask yourself:

• What is ONE thing a competitor did well that I could adapt for my own brand?
• What is a question or complaint I saw in their comments that I can address with a piece of content?
• Is there a content format they aren't using (like Reels or expert interviews) that could be an opportunity for me?
• Based on their ads, is there a messaging angle I haven't tried yet?

By regularly turning your analysis into just one or two actionable tasks for the following week, you’ll start building a smarter, data-informed Facebook strategy that helps you stand out and win over your target audience.

Final Thoughts

Consistent competitor tracking transforms your approach from reactive to strategic, furnishing you with the insights needed to create more engaging content, launch more effective ad campaigns, and build a stronger community. By setting up a simple but repeatable process, you move beyond guesswork and start making marketing decisions based on real-world data.

Once you have all this competitive intelligence, structuring it into a powerful content plan is the next step. To help with this, we built Postbase with a beautiful, visual calendar that simplifies your content strategy. Planning everything in one place lets you act quickly on the gaps you find in your competitors' activity, helping you schedule content that’s timely, relevant, and consistently one step ahead.