The reveal tab offers free content to

encourage people to Like a company. Check

out the free content on offer by your

competitor. Does it perform better than your

content, receiving more Likes and shares?

Does their profile as a whole have more Likes

than yours? If either is the case, you may

want to adjust your strategy to offer similar

types of content on a similar schedule.

Sort their wall comments to find what

customers like and dislike about your

competitor. First, sort their Wall posts to

show Top Rated, organized by Most Recent.

These comments will tend to be the most

widely accepted positive comments about

your competitor.

Link.getStats is the Bond gadget of Facebook

spies. Most people think that the only

publicly available information on their

Facebook profiles is the content that they

post. That’s far from true. Facebook profiles

also log and report activity, visits, and even

shares and clicks on links including the root

domain.

Spying can be hard work! Luckily, there is a

tool called Hyperalerts that can keep tabs on

your competitors. Officially, Hyperalerts is

designed for personal use, but it works as a

great spying tool. A good how-to can be seen

at Convince and Convert.

This is playing dirty, but it works. Watch your

competitors’ news posts and Wall comments

for a major weakness: missing product

features, poor shipping times, server

changes, customer service wait times, etc.

When something comes up, construct an ad

campaign that promises exactly the solution

that your competitors’ fans need.

You cannot look directly at old ad campaign

posts through Facebook, but these days

everything on the internet, including ads, is

logged and remembered somewhere. The

best tool for finding historical ads is Auto

Traffic Fast. By looking at how a competitor’s

Facebook advertising has evolved, you can

stand on the shoulders of their years of trial

and error.

This one is a bit of a dirty trick more than a

sneaky trick, but I’ve seen other brands use

it to some successful degree, so it felt wrong

not to mention it.Imagine your biggest

competitor is having some kind of crisis. For

hosting companies, it would be massive

server downtime. For automobile makers, it

would be major recalls.

Whenever you see complaints on the

competitor’s fan page, you might want to

laugh unless you have been struggling to find

better ways to respond to criticism on your

own fan page from disgruntled customers. If

that is the case, you can learn how your

competitors respond to negative posts on

their wall.

One of the best things about Facebook fan

pages is that the majority of information is

open and available for public consumption.

You generally don’t even have to like the

page to find out what people are saying –

just go directly to the wall and ignore the

welcome tab / reveal tab.

One of the best ways to get more likes on

Facebook is to offer a freebie in what is

known as a reveal tab or fan gate.

http://www.adluge.com/blog/marketing-

intelligence/social-targeting/tips-spy-

competitors-facebook/

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/spy-on-your-

competition/