This article explains the difference between public and private data, how to check for the amount of available post and audience data history, how to check data freshness, and more.

All data shown in the Competitive Public Data section of your account (for all companies including your own), is public and includes engagement metrics, post activity, and follower count.

Rival IQ collects all data shown the Your Private Data section from private accounts that a user in your account connected to. Data in this section is only available to users in your account and includes reach, demographics, and spend.

Follow the steps below to determine how much post and audience data is available for a company on a specific channel.

To check data history:

1. Click Landscape > Companies in the left navigation bar or go to Companies.

2. Hover over a checkmark for a company/channel combination in the company matrix.

Rival IQ shows how must history is available for posts and audience data.

The start date for public data from a particular channel is the day a company was first added to Rival IQ by a customer. Rival IQ accumulates data for that company from that date moving forward and this data is accessible by all customers. A given company profile may have been part of Rival IQ for months or years. 

If you add a company that is new to the system, Rival IQ it begins accumulating audience data for that company starting on that day and moving forward. Rival IQ does not have access to historical audience/follower data.

Rival IQ pulls up to 24 months (depending on the channel) of post history using public APIs from social channels. The maximum historical post content that Rival IQ can retrieve per channel is the following:

Rival IQ does not begin collecting private data until the account is connected to Rival IQ. For additional information, see Connecting Private Accounts.

The messages "Not enough history" or "Data not available" appear when you’re viewing data for a date range for which Rival IQ does not have post or follower data.

To determine the underlying reason for one of these messages, hover over the message. After Rival IQ has collected data for the specified date range, the message will no longer appear. Every day Rival IQ follows the company means it accumulates an additional day of data history. To eliminate these messages, try a smaller date range using the Custom Range option.​
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Each time you visit Rival IQ or activate a landscape in your account, Rival IQ checks to ensure your data is up-to-date within the freshness limits of your plan. For example, if you have a 6-hour data freshness limit, Rival IQ updates the recent post data for any post that has not been updated in at least 6 hours.

When your data needs refreshing, Rival IQ refreshes the data and then prompts you to reload the page. Hover over the checkmark in the top bar to check how recently Rival IQ pulled new posts for all of the companies you follow.

We strive to provide you with the freshest data possible while staying compliant with the various social platforms' terms and policies. To view the date a specific post's metrics were refreshed, click the post and hover over the information bubble next to the published date. In the image below, you can see the post was published on Aug. 16, 2022, and the data was refreshed on Aug. 19, 2022 at 10:35AM PDT.

Most posts receive a majority of their engagement during the first few days after the post is published. For this reason, Rival IQ updates post metrics for 14 days after the post's publication date for all platforms except Twitter. Due to limitations from Twitter, Rival IQ can only update Tweets for 5 days after they were published. After this initial 14-day refresh period, the periodic refresh schedule for older content varies based on the platform, published date, and any related boosting activity on the post.

Get an introduction to Engagement Rates, which help you measure how much an audience interacts with brand content.