DocsSorting
The outlier badge
What the ×12 in the corner of a post means.
Sorting by views tells you which post is biggest. The outlier badge tells you which one overperformed. On a large account those are rarely the same post.
The problem it solves
An account with two million followers has a floor: its tenth-best post still clears a million views. Sorting by views hands you ten posts that did exactly what that account always does.
What you actually want is the one that broke the pattern, because that one is carrying an idea rather than just an audience. That's what the badge marks.
How it's worked out
It takes the median of the batch you just sorted and divides each post's value by it. A ×10 means ten times that account's usual numbers.
- It uses the median rather than the average, so one past breakout can't quietly raise the bar for everything else.
- It needs at least 10 posts in the batch. With fewer there's no baseline worth having.
- Anything over ×3 is highlighted.
- It's measured against whichever metric you picked: sort by likes and the badge compares likes.
It isn't a separate way to sort, and that's deliberate. The median is a fixed number for the whole batch, so dividing by it can't change the order: sorting by outlier would give exactly the same list as sorting by the underlying metric. The badge still earns its place, because it tells you how far each one went.
Where it appears
On every network and on every sort, free plan included. It costs nothing and spends no credits.
In the export
The outlier travels as its own column, and as a number — 2.4, not «×2.4» — so you can sort and filter by it in Excel.