What is Facebook Post Quality Score?

This is a recovered post from 2009 but is still relevant to engagement on Facebook

Can you beat my 205.9 Facebook Post Quality Score?

Google has their Quality Score and PageRank, Yahoo! has its Quality Index, and now Facebook has a Post Quality Score. There have been a lot of people asking about what a good score is and what it means, so I thought we’d share Facebook Quality Scores from a few of them (we have about 30 pages).

Here’s what Facebook says about the Post Quality Score:

The Post Quality score measures how engaging your Posts have been to Facebook users over a rolling seven-day window.

And here’s what factors govern it:

When you create compelling content, your fans may choose to interact with the material by commenting, liking, or writing on your Wall. These fans help to spread your content virally throughout Facebook, as their engagement leads to organic stories being published in their friends’ News Feeds.

Your Post Quality is determined by the percentage of your fans that engage when you post content to your Page. It is calculated on a rolling seven-day basis. The number of stars depends on how your Post Quality compares to similar Pages (for example, Pages that have a similar number of fans.)

So let’s look at a few of our pages and see how their level of interaction affects the page’s Quality Score.

Client A has a Facebook Post Quality Score of 205.9, while Client B has a score of 55.4– Client is 3.7 times higher. Why?

Looking at Client A you can see that nearly every one of his posts gets commented and usually has several comments. Plus, multiple people like his posts. On a side note, if you hit “like” on enough items, it will trigger a “suggestion” on the homepages of related users. We don’t know the ratio you have to hit. The small fan base of 22, but highly interactive– 8 interactions. Do you know anyone else with a Quality Score higher than this?

Looking at Client B, it has a larger fan base– 164 fans– and even more interactions– 21. But the proportion of interactions is only 12.8%, which is 21/164, while Client A Wilcox is 36% (8/22). Thus, the percentage of interactions is 2.8 times higher for Client A Wilcox. However, his Quality Score is 3.7 times higher.

If Facebook Post Quality Score is measured by the percentage of fans interacting, which is similar to the number of interactions divided by fans– let’s calculate the:

• In the last 7 days, Client A has had 5 unique fans interacting on his page. 5/22 is 22.7%.
• In the last 7 days, Client B has had 8 unique fans interacting. 8/164 is 4.9%.
• The ratio of 22.7% to 4.9% is 4.7 times– still don’t have the 3.7.
• If you count yourself in these interactions, then the number skews to 4.97, even further away.

This is not an exact math and I don’t think folks are going to count all the different variations of fans, commenting, and friending possible to determine the formula for the Facebook Post Quality Score. It’s also not clear how this Quality Score has practical value.

Will it effectively discount the price of PPC, as you see with the search engines (where Quality Score x max bid = AdRank)?

Will it evolve like the SEO industry, where Post Quality Score may drive search rankings? I can’t seem to figure out how Facebook is determining the order of search results– I’m guessing it’s as simple as whether the word is actually in the page’s name. For example, search for “Harlem Globetrotters”– you’ll have a hard time finding the official group, which is called “The Original Harlem Globetrotters”. Search “basketball” and you’d expect to see the NBA in there, right? Nope, just a bunch of results that have the word “basketball” in them. Anyway, Facebook’s internal search is a topic for another post. I can see Facebook evolving in search, which will spawn dozen of experts trying to calculate how to game Quality Score and rankings, just like in SEO.

Here’s what Facebook has to say about how to increase your Quality Score:

To increase the number of Interactions and improve your Post Quality you may consider the:

• Making sure that your posts, whether they are Status Updates, photos, links, or videos, are relevant to your fans. Posting engaging content is the best way to get people to interact with your Page.
• Posting frequently, but not posting an overwhelming amount of content that users may find spammy or burdensome to consume.
• Increasing your total fan base to generate more interactions: Promote your page with an ad

A couple of things are true here. If you spam your list to generate more fans, it will hurt your Post Quality Score. Having a counterbalance to just raw friends (which is what folks do on Twitter and the old MySpace train days) is a good thing– Facebook should create incentives to encourage good behavior in the community. Also, they want you to advertise. I wonder if interactions from a paid ad count the same as a natural one? I wonder if this will spawn an industry of paid interaction folks, just as you see with paid links.

Let’s take a look at the Insights page from Client B– they provide free funeral planning advice, in case you’re wondering.

Of the 21 interactions in the last 7 days (I think they should change to 14 days, since 7 days aren’t much data and causes noise in the calculation for the small guys), 19 of them are likes. Liking is an easy way– and an automatable way– to create interactions without having to actually come up with something clever to say. Perhaps people will generate tools to auto-like posts in order to drive up their Facebook Post Quality Score.

Fan growth jumped from 109 to 161 fans in one day, largely because we mass invited from my profile. As far as we know, you don’t get hurt mass inviting, even if you have thousands of fans. We’ve tested where we’ve invited 500 or 1,000 folks at a time– the system lets you do this, but it’s a manual process. Then again, inviting too many fans who aren’t really fans will potentially hurt your Post Quality Score. We should call that FPQS or something– quite a mouthful.

I’d think a better measure of quality would include the percentage of active fans multiplied by a spamminess index (governed by how many people unsubscribe and how many folks don’t contribute real comments). What has been your experience with Facebook’s Quality Score? Have you been able to beat Client A’s 205.9? What’s the maximum score possible?

Dennis Yu

Dennis Yu is co-author of the #1 best selling book on Amazon in social media, The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads. He has spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. Mr. Yu is the "million jobs" guy-- on a mission to create one million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations. You can find him quoted in major publications and on television such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and LA Times. Clients have included Nike, Red Bull, the Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos-- down to local service businesses like real estate agents and dentists. He's spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries, having flown over 6 million miles in the last 30 years to train up young adults and business owners. He speaks for free as long as the organization believes in the job-creation mission and covers business class travel. You can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings, and taking Kaqun oxygen baths-- likely in a city near you.

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