Using Facebook’s ‘Pages to Watch’ to Monitor Your Hotel’s Competition

There’s a lot to talk about when developing a social media strategy for your hotel. One aspect to keep in mind when forming this strategy is to monitor how your competitors are doing. While the majority of your efforts should be focused on your property, you also want to make sure you are eyeing what your competitors are doing well. This insight can help you create better posts and possibly even connect better with your target audience. Facebook has an excellent feature called ‘Pages to Watch’ that allows you to track five or more of your competitors easily. Facebook only provides access to these features on active pages, which have at least 100 fans, so if you have under 100 fans, you can either work to organically grow your Facebook likes or run Facebook ads to increase your likes.

To access Facebook’s ‘Pages to Watch’, visit your page’s Insights section and scroll to the bottom of the page. Once pages are added, Facebook will rank all pages, including your own, to give you an idea of where you stand amongst your competitors. Factors used to determine your rank include total page likes, the percentage that your page likes have increased from the last week, the number of posts this week, and the amount of engagement (likes, comments, shares) from the previous week. This section gives you a general overview of how your Facebook page is performing compared to your competitors, and lets you know where you may need to step up your game.

For a more insightful look at your competitor’s posts, click ‘Posts’ on the left column when you are in the Insights section of your page. Next, at the top center of the page, click ‘Top Posts from Pages You Watch.’ You will see a list of five competitors, ranked in order based on who had the best performing post of the week. Though you can watch more than five pages, you will only be able to see five of your competitors whose posts performed the best. In this section, you will be shown:

• Name of your competitor’s page- This is a link that you can click to view their full page.
• The date and time the post was published (will be within the last week)
• The actual post- This is clickable as well and will show you the full post
• Total engagements- this includes total likes, shares, and comments. If you are interested in viewing the exact number of each of these, you can click on the post.

All of your post metrics will be displayed under this section, so you can compare how your posts performed against your top-performing competitors. If their posts are performing better than yours, you can use this feature to determine whether it has to do with the topics they are choosing, the writing, whether or not they are running ads, or another factor.

It only takes a few minutes to add pages to watch, and since the feature gives you information for the past week, you can designate a specific day each week to take a look at how your competitors are performing. Before you begin using the features, first determine who your competitors are. These should be other hotels that have the same target market as your hotel and are in your local area. For example, if your hotel were to lose a customer to a nearby hotel, which ones would they be?

Though you wouldn’t want to copy a competitor’s strategy outright, you may be able to gain some ideas on what topics to post about and what types of issues garner more engagements, which can ultimately lead to you communicating better with your target market.