The scores in Echobox (sometimes referred to as Virality potential) are a prediction of how much traffic an article is going to bring in if shared immediately, relative to all other articles that you have shared on a given day (even if already posted or scheduled).
Several inputs are considered when calculating scores, including the article content, real-time traffic to the article on the website, and the time of day. These values can change over time, which is why scores update dynamically throughout the day. Installing the Web Tag is crucial in making these scores as accurate as possible.
Content
Echobox analyzes the words within an article and estimates how well this type of content will perform, based on how well similar content (from other articles) has performed in the past.
The content scoring is page-specific, so the same article will have different content scores on each of your social pages. This is because each page has a different audience, which will have engaged with articles differently in the past.
Traffic
Because Echobox is connected to your real-time website analytics, this allows the monitoring of how much traffic new articles are getting on your website. It is also possible to see which source that traffic is coming from (e.g. direct, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). This information can then be used to predict how well each article is likely to perform on your social pages.
Time of day
Content performance will vary depending on the time of day the share is made. Peak times across your websites and your social pages are not necessarily equal.
In general, scores will be lower at night as fewer people are active. Each social page will also have other low-traffic periods throughout the day and specific content might perform better in the mornings rather than the evenings, for example.
Using Echobox scores
It's best to think of Article Scores as a ranking. To obtain the best performance, you should schedule the best content available that can be found at the top of your Home Feed. If your highest-ranked article has a Score of 40, it still makes sense to schedule it (unless there's already loads of content scheduled).
Autofeed
When selecting content for posting, the Autofeed will pick the articles with the highest scores as long as they are not being blocked by any Autofeed rules (such as certain keywords or Evergreen only for reshares).
Sometimes, the Autofeed will replace an article it has already scheduled with a different one because the new article now has a higher score. This is to ensure that it's always the best content that is being posted.
FAQs
What is a good score?
There is no such thing as a "good score". What matters is the ranking. In general, you should always pick the articles with the highest scores. Sometimes this will be a 95 and an 89 and sometimes it will be a 65 and a 52.
Scores don't seem accurate for a new Page
New pages go through a process where the share history is used to train our models. For new Social Pages there is often very little data to use. In this scenario, Echobox will identify suitable default settings, rather than rely on a small sample which could cause unpredictable behavior.
This will be resolved once your Page starts actively sharing so that a history can be built up and used to train our internal models.
How often are scores updated?
- Articles published 6 hours ago: every 10 minutes
- Articles published 6 hours to 1 day ago: every 30 minutes
- Articles published 1 day to 3 days ago: every 4 hours
The algorithms themselves are re-trained continuously. Echobox automatically looks at the performance of all posts from previous days and analyzes whether it could have been any better at predicting that performance.
Why is The Autofeed not picking the top-scored content?
When optimizing, The Autofeed is aiming to maximize over the entire day, not per article. In other words, whilst a specific article may be scored the highest right now, there may be reasons not to share it. For example, it may be that it is predicted to perform even better later, or that another article only has a limited window to be shared within.