People often ask about the scale because they want to have a benchmark for how good their posts are doing. Facebook post quality score is probably not a good representative metric to base decisions.
- Difficult to use as benchmark
- Inconsistent scale
- Doesn’t impact you negatively or positively (yet)
Since it is based on a ratio of interactions vs. number of fans the numbers aren’t consistent from one post to the next. It is much easier to get a high post quality score if you have only few fans. Since you have so many fans it will be more difficult to get a high post quality score. While nobody knows what the highest possible post quality score is, it definitely goes to 1,000 at least. You could use this number to compare from one post to the next if the number of fans remains constant or you could pay attention to the trend over time.
Probably the most effective use of this metric would be to use it to determine which types of posts result in the most interaction. This might help to isolate particular themes or subjects that people respond to – when you find something that people seem to like try to replicate aspects or play on a similar theme in future correspondence. It would be difficult at this time to use the number as a true benchmark unless it was possible to compare it to the quality score of other posts maintaining consistent number of fans.
Currently Facebook does not use this score to help or hurt you although this might change in the future. (Google’s quality score, for instance, impacts how much you pay for advertising) The impact on quality score on Facebook PPC Advertising is going to be important to watch and will probably have a big impact on how successful their adserving becomes.
Another thing that comes up is what do the stars mean – The number of stars is a factor of post quality compared to the post quality of pages with the same number of fans.
I frankly think that they didn’t think through this very much and that it will probably evolve to something more useful as time goes on.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Agreed, it will probably work more like Google quality score in the future.
It’s interesting because one of the things that currently makes Facebook advertising so hot is the the low cost per click. In general conversation people usually indicate that this is because there is not as much competition. It may very well be just a function of the lack of a Google style quality score mechanism. Quality score certainly makes it possible to charge more and boost revenue on a plausibly fair basis.