When a Facebook Page posts to Facebook, each individual Post has a “lifetime”. A Post is considered dead when the growth in engagement is less than 10% of the largest growth of engagement between hourly snapshots. Understanding when a Post dies, or stops receiving engagement, is important because it allows the Admin to plan when to post next. The average Post Lifetime can be a strong indicator in determining optimal Post Frequency.

The average Post Lifetime for a Page is 3 hours and 7 minutes. The median Post Lifetime is 2 hours and 56 minutes, illustrating that most Pages are experiencing Post Lifetimes around 3 hours. This data was sampled for the month of December, 2011 across 500+ Pages and over 30,000 individual Posts. The average Page size was approximately 140,000. Correlations were also examined between Page Size, but results were insignificant.

Average Post Lifetimes for individual Pages were also examined: some Pages averaged a Post Lifetime of approximately 10 hours, while other Pages experienced Post Lifetimes under 15 minutes!

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Facebook defines EdgeRank as: Affinity x Weight x Time Decay. Facebook measures Affinity between Users and Pages by monitoring their interactions. Interactions are objects such as Likes, Comments, Clicks, Shares, Wall Posts, and anything else that Facebook can tangibly measure.

EdgeRank Checker provides complete analytics for Affinity. This is a valuable metric you will not find anywhere else!  

The Affinity grade displays the process of understanding these Interactions. Facebook allows us access to analyze Interactions through Comments and Likes. Understanding how users are interacting with your Page can be incredibly powerful.

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Timing can generally make or break a Post. It’s difficult to determine if a Post succeeded or failed due exclusively to the hour and day of the week without also analyzing a Post’s Timing.

For example, your Page’s fans consistently engage with your content on Friday at 3pm. Your fans also consistently ignore your content on Sunday mornings at 7am. You can expect any content to perform above average at 3pm, so the Timing Grade takes these tendencies into account. Being above your daily average on Friday at 3pm is not necessarily an accomplishment. However, maintaining excellent engagement at this time should still be the target goal. You are likely to maintain these averages regardless of quality of content. The opposite is also true. If your Page struggles to receive engagement on Sundays at 7am we reward your grade if you are able to acquire more engagement within this time frame.

This grade is an attempt to make our suggestions as relevant as possible. We provide the day’s optimal post frequency (based on your historical data), along with that Day’s Best Posting Time, and produce recommendations (in the event of a low grade) on how to improve Timing in the future.

Post Grading gives Facebook marketers an opportunity to analyze the granularity of what creates a successful, or failed, Post. It is important to understand a Post’s strengths and shortcomings to apply what works for future posts.

• Determine how frequently to post
• Examine if your posts are cannibalizing other posts
• Analyze the lifetime of different types of content (photo, video, etc)

Post Grading analyzes 8 different metrics to provide a grade for a Post. Each metric provides a different important perspective that determines the quality of the Post. In some situations, Facebook has yet to report finalized data, in which case we nullify the grade (it does not negatively impact the Post’s grade). In this blog post, we will analyze how to best use Lifetime.

The Lifetime metric is a unique measurement of the actual lifespan of your Post. Our system analyzes your Page’s content every hour to keep an updated record of how long the Post was relevant. This can be very beneficial in understanding how often to update, or how overlapping posts, can impact your success. Continue reading →