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Amol Ghemud Published: August 14, 2018
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For any internet savvy business, Social media is the most popular medium to reach a wide audience and engaging with existing patrons. With 2 million monthly active users and billions of groups and pages, Facebook is the most actively engaged social media platform and often a cornerstone of any social media strategy.
The Riddles
So, let’s look some of the most frequent riddles to solve when generating content for Facebook
What kind of Facebook posts should I create, the theme and tone to follow?
Which format works best? Plain text, images, infographics or videos
How often do I need to post content for the best results? Do I need to post daily or even multiple times a day?
How long should I keep my posts? What character length?
What time during the day should I post updates?
Well, the short answer is that there is no one correct answer.
Take A Hint
There are no definite rules to drafting a Facebook (or social media) strategy. Sure, there are some best practices but what works for one Page may complete fail for he other. The reason for that every page has a unique target audience, the people they would like reach and for him whom the content is created.
Different group of people consume information differently. One of the first thing to do is to understand what kind of an audience are you trying to reach with your page.
The second thing to do is to find out what pages are they already following, and learn from them.
Going to the mattresses
Whenever you launch a Facebook page and start posting content, you are basically competing with all similar pages for your audience’s attention. And this can actually be a good thing. Make it work to you favour.
Make data-driven strategy decisions instead of taking wild stabs in the dark.
Follow the following
Identify Your Main Competitor – Make a list of all the pages you think publish similar content as yours, particular pages that are doing well. Pages that have a large following and on an average get good engagement (like, comments, shares) on their posts.
Use the Facebook Graph APIs to extract their post data for the last 3 months. You need at least 3 months data to find discernible trends.
Analyse this data. Look for trends like, at what time did posts perform the best, do they get more engagement on images or videos, how often are they posting.
It may be a little tedious but it will give you real insights into how you should draft your strategy, and a well crafted content strategy can make all the difference.
Graph APIs – What the heck is that?
You might think to yourself that I’m not a technical person. How am I supposed to figure out this API thing. Actually, it’s quite easy. Just follow the easy steps on this link to extract data from your competing FB pages.
Still too technical for you? Try this easy Facebook Extractor Tool to Spy on your competitors.
Happy Hunting!
For Curious Minds
A data-driven approach is essential because it replaces guesswork with evidence, ensuring your content strategy is tailored to your specific audience's proven preferences. Relying on generic advice fails to account for the unique behaviors and tastes of your target demographic, whereas analyzing competitors who already engage that same audience provides a direct roadmap to success.
This method allows you to build a strategy based on what already works. A structured analysis involves:
Identifying Core Competitors: Pinpoint pages with high engagement that serve the same audience you want to reach.
Data Extraction: Use tools like the Facebook Graph API to gather at least three months of their posting data, creating a robust dataset.
Pattern Recognition: Analyze the data to find trends in post timing, content format (images vs. videos), and topic themes that generate the most likes, comments, and shares.
By adopting this analytical framework, you make informed decisions that increase engagement and avoid the common pitfall of creating content in a vacuum. Discover how to apply this to your own page by exploring the full methodology.
Understanding your audience goes beyond basic demographics; it requires deep insight into their digital behavior and content consumption habits. Identifying the pages they follow offers a direct window into their interests, the tone they respond to, and the content formats they prefer, providing a much richer dataset than a simple persona.
This approach gives you a competitive edge by revealing a proven formula for engagement. Your goal is to reverse-engineer their success by looking at:
Content Themes: What topics consistently earn high engagement on the pages your audience loves?
Voice and Tone: Is the language formal, casual, humorous, or technical?
Community Interaction: How do these pages respond to comments and foster a sense of community?
By learning from pages that have already captured your desired audience's attention, you can refine your content pillars and accelerate your page's growth. See the full article for a guide on how to effectively learn from these established pages.
A strategy built on direct competitor analysis delivers highly tailored and effective results, whereas one based on general trends often leads to generic content with mediocre engagement. The core difference is specificity; analyzing competitors who target your exact audience provides a customized blueprint for success, while broad trends are not optimized for any single niche.
Consider the factors you should weigh when choosing your approach:
Relevance: Competitor data reveals what works for your audience, not a generic one. General trends might suggest video is king, but your audience may prefer detailed infographics.
Efficiency: Analyzing successful posts saves you from wasting resources on trial-and-error experiments with content formats or posting times that are unlikely to perform well.
Competitive Edge: This method allows you to identify gaps in your competitor's strategy or popular topics they cover, enabling you to create even better content and capture their audience's attention.
Ultimately, using the Facebook Graph API or similar tools for analysis yields a much higher return on investment. Dive deeper into the article to learn how to apply this superior method.
Random posting fails because it lacks a strategic foundation, resulting in wasted effort and minimal connection with your audience. The competitor analysis framework provides a direct solution by replacing guesswork with a systematic, data-informed process that uncovers what content formats, topics, and timings are already proven to work.
This method immediately corrects the core issue of directionless content creation. By systematically examining your competitors, you gain actionable insights that directly inform your content calendar. For instance, you can pinpoint:
Optimal Posting Times: Discover the specific hours when your shared audience is most active and engaged.
Winning Formats: Determine if images, videos, or text-based posts generate the most interaction.
Resonant Themes: Identify the subject matter that consistently sparks conversation and shares.
This strategic intelligence ensures every post you create has a higher probability of success, moving you away from random acts of content. Learn the specifics of this process to build a more effective strategy.
A direct-to-consumer fashion brand could use this data-driven method to transform its results. By analyzing a key competitor's Facebook page data from the last three months, they might discover that posts featuring customer photos (user-generated content) receive 50% more comments and shares than their own studio-shot product images.
The analysis would reveal several key patterns to inform a strategic shift:
Peak Engagement Time: The data shows that these high-performing user-generated posts are almost always published between 11 AM and 2 PM on Saturdays and Sundays.
Effective Calls-to-Action: The competitor's captions frequently include questions like “How are you styling your weekend look?” which encourages user submissions and interaction.
Authenticity Sells: The raw, authentic feel of customer photos resonates more strongly with the target audience than polished, professional content.
Armed with this evidence, the brand can pivot its own strategy to launch a weekend UGC campaign, leading to higher engagement and a stronger community. Explore the full article for more examples of this strategy in action.
Looking beyond simple likes is crucial for uncovering a competitor's true content formula. To get a complete picture, you must track shares and comments, as these metrics indicate a much deeper level of audience connection and content value.
A successful content formula is revealed by analyzing how these metrics interact across different posts. For instance:
Shares as an Indicator of Value: A high number of shares suggests the content is highly valuable, relatable, or entertaining, signaling that the audience finds it worthy of broadcasting to their own networks. This points to strong topic-audience fit.
Comments as a Measure of Conversation: A high comment count, especially with substantive replies, indicates that the content is thought-provoking and successfully initiates a community dialogue. This reveals effective engagement tactics in the post copy.
Engagement Rate Over Time: Tracking these metrics across a three-month period helps you identify consistent themes and formats that are part of a deliberate content pillar strategy, not just one-off viral hits.
The full article explains how to interpret these patterns to build your own high-performing content plan.
A marketing manager can establish an evidence-based strategy by systematically gathering and analyzing competitor data instead of starting from scratch. This process provides a clear baseline and shortens the learning curve for engaging a new audience.
Here is a stepwise plan to follow:
Identify 3-5 Main Competitors: Search on Facebook for keywords related to your business. Look for pages that have a large, engaged following and post content similar to what you plan to create.
Prepare for Data Extraction: Familiarize yourself with the Facebook Graph API. You will need to set up a developer account and generate an access token to make requests. Alternatively, find a third-party Facebook Extractor Tool if the API seems too technical.
Extract Post Data: Use the API or the tool to pull all public post data from your selected competitors for the last 90 days. This includes the post text, type (photo, video, link), creation time, and engagement numbers (likes, comments, shares).
Organize the Data: Export the collected information into a spreadsheet for analysis. Create columns for each data point to easily sort and filter.
This initial dataset is the foundation for your data-driven content calendar. Learn more about analyzing this data effectively in the complete guide.
Ongoing competitor analysis is the key to maintaining agility and long-term success on a dynamic platform like Facebook. A 'set-and-forget' plan quickly becomes obsolete as algorithms change and audience tastes shift, while continuous analysis allows you to adapt in near real-time.
This approach builds a resilient and responsive strategy. By regularly monitoring what works for competitors, who are subject to the same algorithmic shifts, you can:
Detect Algorithm Changes Early: If you notice a sudden shift in engagement for certain post types (e.g., video reach drops while text-and-image posts rise) across multiple competitor pages, it may signal an algorithmic update.
Identify Emerging Trends: Stay ahead of the curve by seeing what new content formats or topics are starting to gain traction within your niche.
Continuously Refine Your Tactics: Your strategy becomes a living document, allowing for iterative improvement based on fresh data rather than relying on outdated assumptions.
This proactive monitoring ensures your content remains relevant and effective. Explore the full article to understand how to build this process into your marketing workflow.
Brands that ignore a data-centric approach on Facebook risk significant long-term consequences, including declining organic reach, wasted resources, and eventual irrelevance. In such a vast and competitive digital space, failing to use data means you are essentially flying blind while your competitors are using precision instruments.
The strategic risks multiply over time:
Decreased ROI: Without data to guide decisions, marketing spend is inefficiently allocated to content that does not resonate, leading to poor returns on investment.
Audience Disconnect: As audience preferences evolve, a non-data-driven brand will fail to adapt, leading to a gradual erosion of its follower base and community engagement.
Competitive Disadvantage: Competitors who use data to refine their strategies will consistently outperform, capturing more market share and audience loyalty.
Adopting an analytical culture is no longer optional; it is a fundamental requirement for survival and growth in a crowded marketplace. The full article details how to begin this critical shift.
For a budget-conscious business, the decision between high-production video and simpler, frequent posts hinges on balancing resource investment with engagement returns. Competitor data is the most reliable guide for making this choice, as it reveals what type of content provides the best performance for your specific audience.
You must evaluate the trade-offs:
Cost vs. Frequency: High-production video is expensive and time-consuming, limiting posting frequency. Simple images or text posts are cheap and quick, allowing for daily interaction.
Potential Reach vs. Consistent Engagement: A viral video can provide massive reach, but it's a high-risk gamble. Consistent, daily posts build a loyal community and predictable engagement over time.
Audience Preference: Your decision should be guided by what your audience actually prefers. Analyzing competitor data will show whether their audience rewards a polished video or a simple, authentic photo more.
Using this data-informed resource allocation, you can invest your limited budget where it will have the greatest impact. Read the full article to learn how to find this data.
Once you have the raw data, a structured analysis is needed to transform it into an actionable content strategy. The goal is to move beyond raw numbers and identify clear, repeatable patterns that correlate with high engagement.
A practical method involves these steps:
Analyze Post Timing: Create a pivot table or chart that maps average engagement (likes, comments, shares) to the day of the week and the hour of the day the posts were published. This will reveal your audience's peak activity windows.
Evaluate Content Formats: Segment the data by post type (video, image, link, plain text). Calculate the average engagement for each format to determine which one your shared audience responds to most favorably.
Determine Optimal Frequency: Look at your competitor’s posting schedule. Do they post once a day, or multiple times? Correlate their frequency with engagement rates to see if there is a point of diminishing returns.
This systematic analysis provides a powerful starting point for your content calendar, grounded in proven performance. Discover more advanced analytical techniques in the full guide.
The competitor analysis framework solves this problem by shifting the basis of content creation from internal assumptions to external, validated proof. Instead of guessing what your audience wants, you are observing their actual behavior and engagement with content that is already in the market.
This method provides an objective look at audience preferences, correcting for internal biases. By analyzing what is already working for a competitor targeting the same people, you gain:
Validated Topics: You can see exactly which themes and subjects generate the most conversation and shares, eliminating the risk of choosing topics that fall flat.
Proven Formats: The data will show whether your audience prefers quick-hitting images, in-depth videos, or informative infographics, guiding your production efforts.
Effective Tone of Voice: You can model your communication style on the tone that is already proven to be effective with your target demographic.
This market-led approach dramatically increases the likelihood of your content succeeding from day one. See how to implement this strategy by reading the complete article.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
Growth Strategy and Planning
