How to Target Fans of an Instagram or Facebook Page
Published: 2022-02-04 13:05:08

Your competitors are your biggest enemies. Especially the ones that are outperforming you. But did you know that you can leverage their social audience to find leads and customers?

That can be easily done by targeting your competitor's Instagram and Facebook followers. But why do this? The people that follow your competitors are the most relevant people that you can target for your business, and by not doing so you're missing out on a huge audience!

In this article you will find out how to leverage your competitor's social media presence and target their followers on Facebook and Instagram. While there's no native targeting option on Facebook ads for this, there's a very straightforward alternative solution.

## How Target Competitors Followers With Facebook Ads

The most effective way to target the followers of any competitor is by using Instagram data with Facebook ads (it’s very simple).

All you have to do is get the emails from Instagram followers of your closest competitors, and import them in the Custom Audiences feature on Facebook. That way the ads you run will only be shown to those people.

But before I dive into it, it's important to understand what custom audiences are and how to use them.

## What Are Custom Audiences on Facebook?

The custom audiences feature allows you to target people based on sources like engagement on a Facebook post, traffic to your website, or people from your customer email list.

After you import a customer list in Facebook Ads Manager, Facebook crosschecks them and finds the people from the list that are active Facebook or Instagram users.

This is how you will target your competitors' audience. Facebook doesn't verify the source of the customer email list you import. This means that if you can get your hands on an email list from your competitors' audience, you'll be able to directly target them. 

And the best part is, with Facebook ads manager you can run ads and both Instagram and Facebook.

## Why Use Instagram Data?

It's 2022 and businesses have long since moved on from Facebook pages to Instagram pages as their brands' main community base.
If you check the activity of the Facebook and Instagram page of any brand you will see that their social presence on Instagram is much better, they have more followers and higher engagement.
So by going after their Instagram followers, you're covering a significantly wider range of their audience.

## How to Find Emails of Competitor Instagram Followers

If we disregard all the Instagram profiles that are personal, private profiles, or bots, we'll be left with:

- 30% of profiles that are "business profiles" with publicly available emails
- 10% of personal public profiles with an email address written in their bio

Why are so many people using a "business profile" though? A business profile grants access to certain stats that are otherwise unavailable with personal profiles. When a user opts-in for a business profile they allow Instagram to publicly display their email address on their profile page.

So how do you collect these emails?

As an example, let's say that your competitor is Samsung and you want to target people that follow them. All you have to do is go to their Instagram profile, open their followers, and collect each of their emails. 

Only one issue, that would take ages considering Samsung has thousands of followers. But there is a solution, an Instagram data collecting service.

## How To Get An Email List of Competitor Followers

You have 2 options when it comes to building an email list from your competitors' followers:

- If your competitors have less than 500 followers, manually collect the emails in a spreadsheet
- If your competitors have a large number of followers, use a social media data service to get a list of clean data, instantly
 
The service I use is Influencers Club. After you share your competitors with them, they will visit their pages and analyze each of their followers. They will then collect their email addresses and along with other publicly available information.

They also offer advanced targeting options like location, age, gender, category (niche), and number of followers, just to name a few (ex. only target the followers from a certain location, that are either male or female, that are over 25, etc).

## Why Having Clean Data Is Essential

Clean data is the most important aspect of this strategy. If the data isn't validated before you import the emails as a custom audience, Facebook might notice a high number of invalid and nonexistent emails and ban your ads account.

Luckily the service I mentioned uses external APIs to validate all of the data and clean it from spam traps, fake accounts, bots, and invalid emails.

## Target Competitors Followers With Custom Audiences

Go to your Facebook Ad Manager and click on more tools, then click on the "Audiences" field.


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/fx2gwtppg00v0wps1pvm.png)
![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ta042z5vwbh496vgkbmj.png)

Click on "Create a Custom Audience". 


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/bfzno4po58xsw7rvu1an.png)


Facebook will ask you to pick a source for your custom audience. Click on "Customer List".


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/s76awflv89k2vsw26q5f.png)

Then upload your CSV of followers' emails, and wait for Facebook to match your contacts with theirs.

Since in this strategy we use emails from Instagram followers i.e. publicly available data from Instagram. The match rate is very 
high (80% on average).

## Target Competitors Followers Using Lookalike audiences

A Facebook Lookalike Audience is an advanced type of interest based targeting that searches for people with similar characteristics to your existing customers.

Follow these steps to set up a Lookalike Audience to target followers of competitors:

Go to your Facebook Ads Manager and click on "More tools" on the left side of your screen


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/u6ssrrufmv1gvbrqgtlw.png)

Click on "Audiences"


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/0h8qeaq40d93ei4sfpmb.png)

Click on "Create a Lookalike Audience"


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/guj0opzb6w1u6tahjekm.png)

Then a popup will appear. This is where you set your lookalike audience size, location, and source.


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/sgy92jzybekixq0aq0y1.png)

## Target Competitors Followers Using Facebook Interests

Interest based targeting is another good way to target your competitor's fans on Facebook.

To do this, manually visit fans of your competitors' page and review their profiles while taking notes on what they are interested in. Then in the Facebook ads manager find interests that match, or are very similar.

This process can be labor-intensive. It takes a lot of time and resources to collect the information you need for your targeting. But it can be worth it.

## Ad Creative for Targeting Competitors Audience

When it comes to creating ads for your campaign, there are a few things you can do to maximize your results.

These people already know the types of products you offer because they are familiar with your competitors. So the copy and designs of your ads need to highlight certain aspects that you do better than your competitors.

For example:

- Offer discounts based on competitors prices
 
Price and quality are the two most important things in the eyes of customers. When crafting your ad creatives display the prices, and set them lower than your competitors by at least 25%.

- 
Point out why your products are better than your competitors
 
Explaining the benefits of your products to these people would be a waste of time (they already know them). 

What you need to do is point out why your products are better than your competitors'. To do this, find your competitors' weak points by reading online reviews and testimonials. Then in your ads show how your products do these things better.

## Wrapping Up

Now you know 3 different ways to target the audience of your competitors on Facebook and Instagram. So next time you find out about a new competitor you can easily target their followers and steal their customers for yourself.