What’s a Breakout Post?

When a company in your Landscape has a successful post, you’ll see that post in a daily or weekly Rival IQ alert. Here’s an example:
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To calculate which social posts should end up in your Rival IQ Alert emails, we first ask the question: which posts perform way above average on the basis of engagement rate? Remember, engagement rate is another way of saying engagement relative to the size of a company's following/likes/+1s.
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We're looking for posts with an engagement rate more than five standard deviations better than the average engagement rate (i.e. better than 99.9999% of the posts in the landscape during the last week).
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We want you to know which of the companies in your landscape are doing a great job at getting engagement - so we use engagement rate and not total engagement as a measure of that success - and can then make a recommendation on top content with much less distortion caused by audience size. This is a much different question than asking: which of my competitors got the most retweets/shares/comments (in absolute terms)? Unless all of your competitors have similar size followings, the competitors with the larger networks will likely dominate your findings and tend to obscure meaningful movement from less sizable competitors.
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