What is the Facebook Pages to Watch Feature and How Do You Use it?
The Facebook Pages to Watch feature is in the Insights section of a Facebook Page. It allows you to see the activity, engagement and audience growth of other Facebook Pages. You'll be able to see what is working for the Pages on your watch list. This information can be a useful benchmark for your own Page and help you to see where you can tweak your Page's posting strategy.
Your Facebook page needs to have at least 100 fans for you to be able to create a list of Pages to watch. When you're in the Insights section of Facebook scroll all the way down to where you see the Add Pages button.
Click on the blue Add Pages button and type in the name of a Page that you'd like watch. You need to add at least five Pages. Initially you may want to select Pages of competitors in your niche to watch. You don't have to like a Page in order to watch it, and you can create a watch list of up to 100 pages if your Facebook Page has 100 to 10,000 fans.
Facebook will deliver the top five posts that received the most engagement for the week. In some cases you may see multiple posts from a particular Page and no results from others. This is of course because Facebook is delivering the posts that received the most engagement.
If you want to see the top posts of the week for a specific page, you can click on the name of that Page in your watch list. When you do that you'll be able to scroll through and see the details of each post: the time and date of the post, the written text that accompanies the post, the medium posted (photo, video, graphic, etc.), and the engagement it received i.e. the comments posted, number of shares and types of reactions received (i.e. the reactions: like, love, haha, wow, sad, angry).
I clicked on the top Facebook Page on my watch list: Social Media Today and here are some of that Pages's top posts for this week. Notice that the top posts are not organized chronologically, but by the post that got the highest engagement.
You can garner useful information by taking a closer look at the top posts of your competitors. Click on a top post and read the comments or look at who has shared the post and where it has been shared.
As you look at other Pages that are in a similar niche as your Page, notice the type of content that's worked for them and come up with similar ideas that might work for your Page. See how often they post and how it affects their engagement. What time of day are they posting their top posts? Do you notice a trend? Look at your Page's posting times and try posting at the same times as these other Pages and see what happens.
In addition to looking at what competitors in your niche are doing, the Facebook Pages to Watch feature can be used for social listening purposes, do market research, and for political and industry monitoring.
If you want to know more about your Page's fans and the types of content that they respond to, you could find out what Pages your fans already like, even if those Pages aren't in the same niche as you.
To find out what other Pages that your Fans like, make sure you are logged into Facebook with your personal profile, and in the search bar type in "Pages liked by people who like [your Page name]."
You might want to also consider adding some of these Pages to your watch list.
Watching other Facebook Pages, whether or not they are in your niche, could inspire a new content strategy, a change in posting schedule or other adjustments to your Facebook posting tactics.
