How to Get Facebook Performance Data for Someone Else’s Page

Everybody does a little Facebook stalking from time to time.

It’s pretty harmless, right? You spend a couple minutes here and there cruising photos from your coworker’s barbecue, or reading status updates posted by your old high school buddies. A fun little time-waster, that’s all.

When it comes to your business, though, it isn’t just a fun little time-waster – not in the least bit.

‍Facebook wants you to stalk your competitors – and they make it REALLY easy to do it.

Back in 2024, Facebook introduced a little feature on your Insights page called “Pages to Watch” – it essentially allows you to cultivate a list of businesses whose performances you want to monitor, and then IT GIVES YOU THEIR DATA.

(And yes – that means other businesses could be creeping on YOUR data, too.)

Well, not too long ago, Facebook totally revamped its Pages to Watch feature to integrate with Business Suite and now it's called "Business to Watch"‍

If you haven’t used Pages to Watch before, this post is for you. Let’s dive right in for a closer look!

First things first – what exactly does Pages to Watch DO?

Think of it this way – you have competitors. (Unless you don’t, in which case, good for you, yo!) And competitors aren’t evil or anything! It’s not like you wanna climb in their office window to steal the secret recipe. You don’t wanna blow their business off the face of the Earth. It’s OKAY to have competitors.

But still, it wouldn’t hurt to get a little peek at what they’re doing differently from you, right?

Benchmarking does just that. Here, I’ll show you!

Now, how you do that?

How to compare Facebook pages performance

The Benchmarking feature allows you to compare your page against other similar pages. And here is how you can do it:

First, you need to have access to Meta Business Suite, which means you will need to have a Facebook Business Page.

• Go to your Facebook Page via Meta Business Suite
• Click on Insights in the left-hand menu
• In your Insights page, click on Benchmark in the left menu
• Select your business category

Now you will have access to your benchmark performance. Which is, in other words, is how you compare your page's metrics to others in your industry or niche.

This feature will give you a comparison about the number of content, Facebook followers, new follows and content interactions based on your industry (the category you choose).

Cool, right? But we can get even more in-depth!

How to compare specific pages?

Okay, now you want to compare your page with your specific competitors, right? You can do that too! You just have to switch from the "Business comparison" tab to the "Business to Watch"

• Click on the Business to Watch tab
• Click in the + Add Businesses button and select all your competitor

This is going to bring up a box that allows you to search for other pages – like your competitors – and add them to your Business to Watch section.

‍Business to Watch shows you how all of the pages on your list – including your own – are stacking up against each other.

For example, we noticed that Taylor Swift gained over 56.3K new followers (or page likes, if you prefer) this week — with just one new post!

Meanwhile, the popular meme page 9GAG lost 32.5K followers, despite posting a whopping 345 times. Are Facebook users not into memes anymore? 😢

Anyway, that’s what the overview looks like – and for the record, you can add up to 100 pages, so feel free to go totally data-crazy over this stuff.

Before you do, though, there’s more to see…

Remember, here we are just talking about your organic content. Facebook Ads has even more detailed Ads benchmarks to show!

How to know you’re watching the right pages

Because you can use Pages to Watch to watch literally any page you want, you have to be sure that you’re choosing the right ones. How do you know which ones to choose?

‍It’s actually a lot easier than you might think, and it’s all thanks to Facebook’s graph search function. Graph search is what allows you to search for things like “People in California who like Grumpy Cat.”

Put in a super specific query, get super specific results. (It’s actually pretty fun to play around with!)

Go up to the search bar at the top of your Facebook page and search for Pages liked by people who like [your company’s name]. The results are the pages that, well, are liked by the same people who also like yours!

These are all pages that have been liked by the same people who liked my own page – it’s like a peek at who and what else interests them. By searching like this, you can make sure you’re paying attention to the same people your audience pays attention to, instead of just guessing at random.

Don’t forget – other people can watch you, too

One of the good things about Pages to Watch is that nobody really KNOWS you’re watching them. One of the BAD things about Pages to Watch is that you never really know who’s watching YOU.

When you get added to someone else’s Pages to Watch list, you get a notification, just like anyone else gets when YOU start watching THEM.

So while you know that someone’s got their eye on you, you don’t know who. On the plus side, it means you can add whoever you want without worrying about them knowing, but then, there’s also that Big Brother-ish aspect to knowing that you’re being watched.

Now that you’ve seen how it works, I’m curious to hear what you think about Business to Watch. It’s been a little bit controversial since Facebook introduced the feature, so what do you think? Is it convenient? Creepy? Both?