Check how any public Facebook Page is doing

Everything is worked out in your browser from the posts Facebook returned. Reactions and comments are the counts on each post at the moment we read it. Shares aren’t counted, because Facebook doesn’t send them for most posts.

Followers are rounded by Facebook: a big Page comes back as a round figure like 39,000,000, while page likes are exact. That is why the rate is approximate, and why it is fairer to compare Pages of a similar size than to chase a single target.

Nine posts is a snapshot, not the Page’s history. One post that took off pulls the average well above what a normal post gets, so every average sits beside its median, and the report says so when the two are far apart. A post only hours old is still collecting reactions, and that is flagged too.

“What stands out” about the best post is a short list of observations: how many times the typical post it beat, whether people commented unusually often, whether it is the only video, whether the caption asks a question or for a comment word. They are patterns in a handful of posts, not proof of what caused them, and with three posts they are very rough.

• An old pinned post at the top of a Page doesn’t make it look dormant: the last-post date is the newest date among the posts read.
• If Facebook sends no view count for a video, the report says so instead of showing zero.
• Posts that come back without a date are left out of the rhythm, and a note says how many.

Tip: To compare two Pages, run both and read the medians and the rate side by side, not the single biggest post.

The tool reads only what Facebook shows the public on a Page: its numbers and the text of recent public posts. It doesn’t read comments, never shows who commented, and doesn’t work for personal profiles or private Pages. Nothing is posted to the Page, and you don’t log in to Facebook.

Each check uses up to 4 of your free look-ups for the day: one for the Page and one for each batch of three posts. You can read fewer posts, or none, and Stop ends a check early. Page numbers can be a few days old and posts up to six hours old, because we keep what we fetch for a short time so the same Page doesn’t cost us twice. Your daily allowance is counted against a scrambled form of your network address, never the address itself.

Reach and impressions aren’t among the public numbers, so they aren’t here. For your own Page, Insights in Meta Business Suite shows reach.

• Benchmark yourself: run your own Page and two Pages in your niche, and compare the medians and the rate rather than the follower counts.
• Spot what works: the best-post notes show whether a Page’s top post asks a question, asks for a comment word or is the only video.
• Judge a partner or a competitor: a dormant Page with a big audience is a very different thing from an active one.

If the posts you admire ask people to comment a word such as GUIDE, DMFast can do that for a Page you manage: it replies under each comment, sends a private message, and answers keywords people send in Messenger. It doesn’t work with other people’s Pages.