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Oh no, what happened to seeing my competitor’s Facebook following? Where did it go? Comparing our social media “performance” to others is important to many brands out there, and Like count on Facebook and other networks, has been an easy way to keep track of who is gaining audience and who isn’t. So this post below by a German Facebook Conference in late October 2016 caught my eye and created some discussion – mostly in Germany as of the time of writing:
It basically said: “Panic by many as the number of Facebook likes is no longer publicly available. It’s okay it’s not that important.”
What? Why would Facebook do that? I couldn’t tell you. Facebook changes things all the time, maybe it was time. There were varying comments below that, in summary, said:
- About time
- Doesn’t matter anyway
- It still matters unfortunately
[Tweet “”My story won’t change because my competitor’s did.” – @ctrappe #digitalmarketing”]
Related:
Prompted by one commenter and after some clicking around, I found that you can still see how many Likes pages have. On desktop, go to the page, click on Likes in the left sidebar and you get this kind of screen:
So it’s still there, it might just take a couple more clicks to check on competitors – if you are checking them manually.
Do competitor social media numbers actually matter?
I can actually argue this both ways. Yes, they matter and are good to know. Are they the cornerstone of my strategy? No.
I do check in on competitor numbers mostly to see if there’s something I can learn from it. How did they get that many followers and my growth is so much slower, for example.
And social media is a numbers game.
[Tweet “”The bigger your relevant audience, the bigger your impact.” – @ctrappe #socialmedia”]
Relevant follower count matters. Of course, as an outsider looking at somebody else’s page, we don’t know how many of those followers are actually super relevant, which ones might be fake and which ones hid all the page’s posts.
Follower count can be an indicator to growth and it’s good to see where we stand and where things are trending.
Recommended:
TV interview: What’s authentic storytelling and why does it matter?
But the number of Facebook Likes is not necessarily a sign of certain success. First of all, Facebook doesn’t show our posts to all of them anyway. Who knows how many hide posts? I know I hide posts all the time and ask Facebook to please show me less from some pages.
In general, if I have to stress over something I prefer to stress over finding that next fantastic story, great piece of content or whatever that I can share with all of you as opposed to how that ranks in relation to all of my competitors.
[Tweet “”Provide unique value to your audience and they’ll stay connected.” – @ctrappe #contentmarketing”]