Facebook metric descriptions
When you connect your Facebook account to Analyze, we will backfill the page data for the last six months and native post data for the previous 30 days.
The table below describes each metric that appears within Buffer's analytics. All metrics are pulled from Facebook's Graph API.
- Looking for basic post metrics instead? Check out our guide to Insights on sent posts within the Publish dashboard.
- Seeing conflicting information? Checkout the article: Why your data in Buffer might differ from your native analytics
| Posts | The number of posts sent. |
| Post Reach* | The number of unique people who saw your posts. |
| Post Impressions | The number of times people saw your posts. This number will always be higher than Post Reach because some people will see your posts multiple times. |
| Page & Post Engagements | The number of times people have engaged with your posts through likes, comments and shares and more. |
| Engagement Rate | The percentage of impressions that resulted in an engagement (total number of comments, clicks, shares and reactions divided by the number of impressions). This is organic data only (organic clicks and organic impressions). Paid metrics are not included. |
| Reactions | The number of reactions your posts received. |
| Shares | The number of times your posts were shared. |
| Comments | The number of comments on your posts. |
| Post Clicks | The number of clicks your posts received. This number includes clicks on the post, links, images or videos and multiple clicks by one user. It includes any link that takes a user away from Facebook. |
| New Fans | The number of fans you gained or lost. Fans are people who have specifically "liked" your page. Fans does not include followers. |
| Total Fans | Your total number of fans. Fans are people who have specifically "liked" your page. Fans does not include followers. |
📝 The Post Reach metric is different than Facebook's Reach metric. Although they sound similar, they're both calculated differently. Facebook's Reach is the number of people who saw any of your posts at least once. This metric is estimated (more information here).
In Buffer, we calculate Post Reach based off the unique number of people that saw your individual posts. These metrics are based on the time period you select (for example, October 3rd - November 2nd) regardless of when the post were published. So for example, if a past post received views during the selected timeframe, it would be included here.