One of the cool things about Facebook is that there’s lots of publicly available data and you don’t need Admin access to get it.

For example, our Competitive / Comparative Analysis Worksheet shows lots of valuable data:

With this simple Excel dashboard you can the following information about anybody’s page.

• The number of Facebook Fans
• The number of Facebook shares
• The number of Facebook likes
• The number of Facebook comments
• The number of Twitter followers
• The number of Tweets

You can get that spreadsheet here: Competitive+analysis+worksheet+retail.xls

This is very useful information especially since if it is your competitors you are tracking.

But it’s not enough.  You need more than snapshot in time

You need to know how they are trending, are there any unusual values, does it correlate to any outside events or campaigns, is there a pattern?

I’m sure you’d agree it would be more useful to be able to go back in time and see what the values were last month and what the trends were day by day or even hour by hour or minute by minute (if you were, for example, tracking tweets about a TV broadcast tied to commercials being shown).

In short, do these steps:

1. Change your Facebook and Twitter queries to create a data file for each day (rather than having a single query that fetches many days)
2. Change your analytics to load the data files, and not to query Facebook or Twitter.
3. Use our PowerPack Scheduler to get fresh data each day and
4. Change the reports to use the new data files.

This blog article is a detailed walk-thru on how to do it.  This lets you gather competitive intelligence historically.

From Facebook, you can also get get:

• Names of commentors (to a status message)
• Listing of their comment
• Number of likes on the comments