FBC – 40 – Will Your Competitors Flat Out Copy You?

Facebook has released a new feature that could help your competitors copy you (or the opposite). So what is this feature and how is this going to impact you? screenshot here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8bwcveiijc20wsb/36409258_10155331182571262_2908249315354869760_n.png?dl=0

My good friend Nathan sent me an update two days ago, about a new feature in Facebook and it is potentially a game changer and it's something you had to invest money for in the past. So when he told me about it I was like oh you know what. I need to go and have a look at it to understand what that means for me as an entrepreneur and what it means for you as well. So the feature is pretty cool actually.

So basically if you go to any page on Facebook you will be able to see the ads that you're currently running. So before you had to buy some software and blah blah blah but now you don't have to do that. So if you go to a page so it needs to be like you know a business page or whatever you go to that page and bottom left there is something that says ads.

Basically what happens is that now if you click on the link you will be able to see exactly what kind of ads these people are running. And what it means for you is that as an entrepreneur, you have an idea of what the big dogs are doing for example. OK. And you know it's not a good idea to just go flat out copy people. OK. That's not what I'm saying.

You shouldn’t go and copy people but at least you have a good idea of what's happening out there. I will actually put an image of it in the podcast so you can click on the link and it will show you what it looks like.

If well if you know exactly what your competitors are running then you can just go and basically you know do the same thing. Right. So I was like well this is what people are going to do. And so I looked at it from a like an e-commerce perspective as well because I do have some e-commerce stores.  And one of the things you need to do when you're running an e-commerce story is to find the best products and sometimes you have no idea what your competitors are running.

So I was like oh you know what. Let me have a look to see if you know if you can if you can actually like go and steal stuff from your competitors which is not very ethical. And I was kind of amazed that Facebook gave this this feature because you know basically it will allow anyone to go and steal some other person's work by finding the right products and all that stuff.

I mean it takes a lot of time. Like people don't actually realize you know you put a lot of energy into finding all these great products. You have a strategy in place. It's not just by chance. Right. And then afterwards people were coming and stealing your stuff. It's not very ethical. I don't understand why Facebook put that in there for everybody.

So I went on and clicked on it and tried it. So I went to of random a random page of someone like a professional speaker. And I saw the ads all right. So you can actually see the ads they are currently running right. You could just stop there and think “that's it. I hit the jackpot.

I just have to copy these ads and do the same thing”. But no that's the thing. No because one thing is that they don't give you the stats of these ads. So you don't know the stats. You can see what's running but you have no idea what the stats are. So how is that a good thing? And how is that a bad thing for someone who wants to copy?

Will Your Competitors Flat Out Copy You?

Even though you can see the ads that are currently running, these people might be like split testing hundreds of different ads. So since you don't have the stats you don't know if these are the winners or if these are just the test that they're going to discard afterwards. See what I mean? So if you're trying to copy someone who does this professionally, you won't necessarily be able to you know, to steal like their stuff.

I was very surprised that this this feature was in there but they limited it so that you can still protect your intellectual properties. And so that's good news. So I'm going to test it a little bit more because I mean I just I had a quick look at it. I'm going to test a little bit more with more pages because I as you can see I didn't remember the exact wording of it and if there is anything I have to report to you guys then I will report to you guys.