Facebook Stats

Merit relies on the Facebook Graph API to pull engagement numbers for stories shared on the Facebook platform. Facebook returns a breakdown of shares, comments, and reactions for a given story, which we present on the achievement engagement report and in the Reports section of your account.

In June 2021, Facebook made some privacy changes to their API and began hiding engagement when those metrics are lower than 100. This was a consequential change because many of the personalized stories you publish through Merit are shared with a small group of people that are connected to the student in Facebook. Each individual story may have a few dozen re-shares, comments, and reactions, but this engagement adds up across all students recognized in an achievement, and we have lost access to much of that data.

As a response, Merit ran a statistical analysis across thousands of achievements published within the last few years, using data we've gathered from Facebook, and have tuned a model to estimate Facebook engagement when we cannot retrieve it from their API. The model bases its estimation on data that we can gather reliably: student and parent email opens, page views, and click-through counts from Facebook. If and when an achievement reaches Facebook's threshold for reporting, we will replace our estimations with the actual numbers.