Sometimes you may notice differences in interactions with posts shared to social media and the PostBeyond Leaderboard. This could be the result of a bug, but often times, this is a result of expected platform behaviour.
In this article, we will go over the different cases where you may see expected data inconsistencies between your Leaderboard and social media interactions. Specifically, this article will go over:
General Considerations: Delays & Data Cap
Below are a few considerations to keep in mind:
Data from your social media accounts takes time to transfer to PostBeyond, so you will not see interactions immediately.
PostBeyond only captures 5 days of data for LinkedIn and 48hrs of data for Twitter and Facebook (with the exception of clickthroughs). Therefore, after these timeframes, any interactions (likes, re-shares, comments, etc.) you received will not show on your Leaderboard. The only interaction that we track without a time limit is click throughs.
Why is there a time limit on capturing Interactions?
PostBeyond has to ping social servers for data around engagements on every post. To ensure that we are not blocked or cause errors, we can only ping LinkedIn's servers a number of times.
From our data analysis, we have mapped out an optimal timeframe for each social network to capture vast majority of interactions. If we were to stretch out this timeframe, we would have to delay our data retrieval from these site, and this would create a gap in accurately capturing points for the leaderboard.
NOTE: we can track clicks without a time limit because the URL shared is PostBeyond's, so we can track that data endlessly.
Ever notice your Facebook sharing and interaction data is not correct? This could be the result of one of the following reasons:
You do not have a Facebook account linked to your PostBeyond account. This can be solved by linking your Facebook account to PostBeyond.
If you have a page linked to PostBeyond but you share anywhere that is not that page (ie. it is possible to share posts as a direct message or to groups on mobile). Unfortunately, we cannot capture the data for those shares. We will only capture the share and interaction if you share to the timeline linked in your settings. If you'd like to share to a business page and capture that data, you can do that by linking a business page to PostBeyond.
If you have a business page linked and selected, and you try to share to your personal page. Please ensure that you have the correct page linked throughout the process.
If you share to Facebook multiple times in quick succession. If you share very quickly, again after sharing from PostBeyond, we cannot identify which share to associate engagements for PostBeyond. Please make sure to leave at least 1 minute between shares to ensure that the share and interaction data is captured correctly.
Ever notice a huge inflation on your Twitter engagements and interactions that just don’t seem to add up? This is most likely the result of Twitter bots.
In this article, we will go over Twitter bots, what they are, how they impact analytics, how you can identify a bot - and most importantly - how to flag Twitter bots to PostBeyond.
What are Twitter bots?
Bot traffic is essentially non-human traffic to a website. This is the result of software applications running automated tasks. Bots can perform repetitive tasks very quickly, at a rate that human beings simply can’t manage. On Twitter, they can and will mimic all human user behavior (clicks, likes, etc).
To learn more about Twitter bots, please read Twitter Bots & Blocking. This article will go over how to identify bot and how to get rid of them.