What you posted, and whether it worked
- Trigger
- Social
- Lands in
- Dashboard
- Setup
- 5 min
- Needs
- Nothing else
@supertype on Instagram
Reels earn 3.4 times the engagement of a feed image, on a third of the posts.
- Posts
- 18
- Views
- 42.1K
- Best reach
- 9.8K
- Engagements
- 2.3K
Collected hourly for the first two days after a post goes out, then daily to 30 days.
- 1Paste an account ID and a token
Open the settings sheet on the Social page, choose the platform, and paste the account's own ID along with a long-lived token from your Meta Business Manager. Viably checks both against the platform before storing anything, so a wrong value is rejected at the form rather than discovered days later as a page with nothing on it.
- 2Viably finds what the account has published
A discovery sweep walks the account's posts and records each one with its caption, format, permalink and publication date. It keeps walking backwards through the history until it runs out, so the list fills in without anyone importing anything.
- 3Numbers are collected while they still move
Each post is measured hourly for its first 48 hours, then daily out to 30 days, then left alone. Engagement flattens after that, and an Instagram story stops reporting insights about 24 hours after it goes out, which is why the first day matters so much.
- 4Read it as one account at a time
The Social page shows headline figures, a ranking of which formats do best on the average post, and every post in the window with its own numbers. Switch account and period from the page header or from the command bar.
What each platform gives you
The three report different things, and pretending otherwise is how a reporting tool ends up lying quietly.
Which formats earn their place
The question nobody's native dashboard answers, because it ranks by recency rather than by result.
- Formats are ranked on the average post rather than the total, so publishing twenty of something does not make it look like the thing that works.
- Engagement is likes, comments, shares and saves added together. It is the same sum on every platform, so a figure means the same thing wherever you read it.
- Reach is never summed across posts. The same person reached twice is one person, so the headline shows the furthest a single post travelled instead of a total that overstates the account.
- A Meta Business Manager holding the Page or Instagram account you want to read, and a System User token generated inside it.
- That single token reaches a Facebook Page and the Instagram account linked to it, so connecting both means pasting the same token against two different IDs.
- Threads is a separate product with its own user ID and its own long-lived token, and a Business Manager token will not work for it.
No. This power only reads. It has no publishing endpoint, no scheduler and no composer, and the tokens it asks for grant reading insights rather than writing posts. Nothing you connect here can be posted to.
No, and this is the part most reporting tools get wrong. Viably discovers what the account has already published, so a post made from the Instagram app, from Buffer, or by a colleague on their phone is measured the same as any other.
Because they are still moving. Engagement climbs for a day or two after a post goes out, so Viably captures a fresh post every hour for its first 48 hours, then daily out to 30 days, then stops. What you see on a post from this morning is a figure that has not finished settling.
A dash means one of two things and hovering it says which. Either the platform does not report that metric at all, which is why Threads has no reach column and only Instagram reports saves, or nothing has been collected for that post yet.
Deliberately not in one table. Threads reports no reach and its view counts run about a tenth of Instagram's, so a mixed ranking sorted on engagement would be ranking the platforms rather than the posts. Each account is read on its own.
Viably walks back through everything the account has published, a page at a time, so the post list fills in over the first day or so. Facebook is the only one of the three that also serves historical account figures, so a Page arrives with a follower and reach series while Instagram and Threads start from the day you connect.
Connect an account and the first posts appear within a few minutes. Nothing is ever published on your behalf.
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