I recently had a great question posed to me on my site. I thought it had enough value that I should turn it into a blog post and share the question and my answers to all of you!
So here we go!
Hi Scott. Great questions.
You don't need to "Like" other Facebook Pages to monitor them. Yes, others could see that you have "Liked" them if you did.
There definitely is no algorithmic value to liking competitor Pages.
The "Liking" of a Page is a signal to Facebook that you have interest in the content of the Page and so you could see more of the Page's posts in your News Feed but Interest Lists are the way to go for monitoring. You simply need to check your list regularly to watch and learn, and it does not require a "Like".
For non-competitor Pages where you want to get their posts in your feed, you do want to "Like" the page and engage with their posts. This does trigger the Facebook algorithm to note that the page is valuable to you and therefore the page's posts are weighted to show in your News Feed more often. One of Facebook's criteria for determining what to show you is by your last 50 interactions on Facebook, whether with friends or Pages. Those last 50 posts you engaged with impact the future posts you see out of the multitude of posts you could see (somewhere around 1500 posts per user could be seen each day, Facebook uses their algorithm to narrow this down.)
The other option for Pages you "Like" is to turn on "Notifications". This allows you to get a Facebook alert notification when a page makes a post. Read more on "How to get Page Notifications" >>