Welcome to your go-to guide to Meltwater Engage's Competitive Benchmarking dashboards.
You can compare your owned pages and handles against your competitors and industry peers with our new Competitive Benchmarking dashboards. Choose from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Competitive Benchmarking dashboards.
Looking to learn the definition of a metric within an Analyze report? Check out our dedicated article here.
Define your competitors or industry peers
You will first need to define the competitors and industry peers you wish to compare against from the Monitored Connections page. If you do not have competitors defined, then you will not be able to generate the full report in Analyze.
Facebook and Instagram both require authentication with a personal Facebook account before you can add pages and handles to monitor as competitors. This is a security verification requirement of Meta, to ensure data is being shared with a real account.
Navigate to the Monitored Connections page.
Under Facebook select “Add Account” to authenticate a Facebook account if one has not been authenticated already.
Next to an authenticated account click the three-dot menu and select “Manage Monitored Pages”.
Paste in the URL of the Facebook page you would like to monitor.
Move the competitor toggle to teal to indicate that you would like the monitored page as a competitor handle.
Click Ok
Navigate to the Monitored Connections page.
Under Instagram select “Add Account” to authenticate an Instagram Business account if one has not been authenticated already.
Next to an authenticated account click the three-dot menu and select “Manage Competitors”.
Type in the handle of the Instagram Business account you would like to monitor.
Move the competitor toggle to teal to indicate that you would like the monitored page as a competitor handle.
Click Ok
Navigate to the Monitored Connections page.
Twitter does not require authentication like Facebook and Instagram
Under Twitter select “Add Account” and type the name of the Twitter handle
Click Ok
Format your benchmark dashboard
Within Analyze Social Analytics, select the appropriate Benchmarking dashboard: Facebook Benchmarking, Instagram Benchmarking, or Twitter Benchmarking)
Select + Add accounts at the top, to choose your owned accounts, as well as the competitor accounts and handles you have already connected under the Monitored Connections tab.
From the list of accounts select any combination of your owned profiles and competitor profiles, of up to 10, to be benchmarked against each other.
Then, select Apply
How to Use a Benchmarking Dashboard
Benchmarking dashboards have a collection of comparative metrics, displayed in graphs, leaderboards, charts, and top posts.
Audience/Follower growth - trend lines showing fan growth (or loss) over the selected time period. Also includes a Top Page box, that shows the page with the highest audience growth during the time period, as well as a landscape average, for all selected pages.
Top performing pages - trend lines showing engagement rate over the selected time period. Also includes a Top Page box, that shows the page with the highest engagement rate during the time period, as well as a landscape average, for all selected pages.
Page performance breakdown - a leaderboard of all selected pages. Sort by the column of your choice.
Sent messages by message type - shows the total number of posts broken out by page and message type, in a donut chart.
Sent messages by engagements - shows the total number of Engagements broken out by page and engagement type, in a donut chart.
Total @mentions (Twitter only) - the number of mentions sent to the selected profiles during the selected time period
Top performing posts - an analysis of the top performing posts published during the time period, sorted by engagement rate. Click a post to drill-in for more context, or switch the view from Gallery to List to see all posts, and select a sorting criteria.
Now that you've formatted your report it can be shared via the options with the Actions menu.
Note: Not all owned analytics seen within your Facebook Overview report can be presented within the Competitive Benchmarking report, these include impressions and demographic data.
Data Collection
Competitive data collection begins at the time of connection. There is no retroactive data collection. If you toggle a competitor page off, data collection will stop. Data cannot be backfilled.
Thank you for reading. If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to us via Live Chat!
Team Meltwater