How to Find Top-Performing Posts on Facebook

Knowing what your audience loves on Facebook is the secret to getting more engagement, and it starts with finding your best-performing posts. This guide cuts through the noise and shows you exactly how to identify your content winners, analyze what makes them work, and use that knowledge to create more posts that hit the mark every single time.

Why Finding Your Winning Posts is a Game-Changer

Pouring hours into creating content that falls flat is frustrating. Analyzing your top posts isn't about vanity, it's about building a smart, sustainable strategy. When you know what works, you can stop guessing and start creating with purpose.

Here’s what you gain by focusing on your top performers:

• Audience Understanding: Your best posts are a direct line into what your audience wants, needs, and gets excited about. They tell you which anecdotes, tips, or product highlights genuinely connect with people.
• Refined Content Pillars: You can quickly identify the core themes and formats that consistently perform well. This helps you build out your content pillars - the foundational topics your brand will be known for.
• Increased Organic Reach: Facebook's algorithm favors content that gets early and meaningful engagement. By creating more of what people already love, you’re sending positive signals to the algorithm, which can reward you with broader organic reach.
• Smarter Time Investment: Instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, you can invest your valuable time and resources into content formats and topics with a proven track record.

First, Define “Top-Performing”: The Metrics That Matter

What makes a post "top-performing" depends entirely on your goals. Before you start digging into the data, you need to know what you’re looking for. A post with tons of likes might be a “winner” for brand awareness, but a post with fewer likes but high link clicks is the real champion for driving traffic.

1. Engagement Rate

This is the most common measure of a post’s success. It looks at the percentage of people who saw your post and actively interacted with it.

• What it includes: Reactions (Likes, Love, Haha, etc.), Comments, and Shares.
• Why it matters: High engagement is a strong signal to the Facebook algorithm that your content is valuable, which can boost its visibility. Comments and shares are particularly powerful, as they represent a deeper level of interaction than a simple Like.
• Look for posts that get shares. A share means someone found your content so good they were willing to stake their own reputation on it by showing it to their friends. That's a huge vote of confidence.

2. Reach and Impressions

These metrics tell you how many people saw your content.

• What it includes: Reach is the number of unique people who saw your post. Impressions are the total number of times your post was seen (one person could see it multiple times).
• Why it matters: A post with unusually high reach means it broke out of your immediate follower base. This is often a result of high engagement (especially shares) that snowballed into greater visibility.

3. Clicks

If your goal is to drive traffic or actions, clicks are your most important metric.

• What it includes: Link Clicks (people who clicked the link to your website or landing page), and Other Clicks (clicks on your profile name, the "see more" button, etc.).
• Why it matters: This is a direct measure of how well your post convinced someone to take the next step. It’s the ultimate metric for content aimed at website traffic, lead generation, or sales.

4. Video Views & Watch Time

For video content, these metrics are everything.

• What it includes: How many people watched your video (typically for at least 3 seconds) and the average amount of time they spent watching.
• Why it matters: A high average watch time indicates that your content was compelling enough to hold attention. Facebook heavily favors video, and it specifically rewards videos that keep users on the platform longer.

How to Find Your Top Posts Using Meta Business Suite

Facebook’s free native tools are powerful enough to give you all the data you need. The Meta Business Suite is the central hub for this kind of analysis.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to finding your analytics:

1. Navigate to Meta Business Suite: Log into your account and open the Meta Business Suite for the page you want to analyze.
2. Go to "Insights": On the left-hand menu, click on "Insights."
3. Select "Content": Within the Insights dashboard, you’ll see several options like Overview, Results, and Audience. Click on "Content." This is where the magic happens.
4. Set Your Date Range: In the top right corner, you can set the time frame. To get a good sample size, choose "Last 90 days." This gives you enough data to spot real trends without being skewed by a single viral post from a year ago.
5. Sort by Your Primary Metric: The content overview page will show you a list of all your posts from that period. Now, you can sort them to find your winners. You’ll see column headers like Reach, Likes and reactions, Comments, Shares, and Results.

To find your top posts, simply click on the metric you care about most. For example:

• Click the "Reach" header to see which posts were seen by the most people.
• Click the "Shares" header to find your most shareable, viral content.
• Click "Link clicks" (you might need to customize your columns for this) to identify posts driving the most traffic.

Take note of your top 3-5 posts for each key metric. These are your heavy hitters.

Analysis: What to Do After You've Found Your Winners

Finding the posts is the easy part. The real value comes from figuring out why they performed so well. Create a simple spreadsheet or document and start looking for patterns across your top posts.

1. Identify Common Content Themes

Look at the subject matter of your top posts. Do you see a pattern?

• Are they educational posts that teach your audience how to do something?
• Are they behind-the-scenes glimpses into your business or team?
• Do relatable stories or personal anecdotes get the most shares?
• Are they user-generated content features, showcasing your customers?

Once you spot a theme, you have a blueprint for your next batch of content. If "how-to" tutorials consistently get high engagement, make that a recurring series.

2. Analyze the Format

How was the content presented? Your audience might have a strong preference for certain formats.

• Video vs. Images: Did your top posts have dynamic videos or stunning, high-quality images? Note the length of top-performing videos. Are short, snappy Reels outperforming longer-form videos?
• Carousels: Did posts with multiple images (carousels) get more interaction as people swiped through? This format is great for step-by-step guides or showcasing multiple products.
• Simple Text or Graphics: Did a powerful quote on a simple branded background, or a compelling text-only post, take the top spot? Sometimes simplicity cuts through the noise.

3. Deconstruct the Hook and Copy

Read the first sentence of your best posts. The "hook" is what stops the scroll. What did you do to grab attention?

• Questions: Did you start with a question that made your audience think? (e.g., "What's the one mistake everyone makes when...")
• Bold Statements: Did you open with a contrarian or surprising statement? (e.g., "Most marketing advice is terrible. Here’s why.")
• Storytelling: Did you lead with a personal story or a relatable scenario?

Next, look at the call-to-action (CTA). Was it a direct question to spark comments? A clear instruction to "click the link in our bio"? The best CTAs are specific and easy to follow.

4. Pay Attention to the Comments Section

The comments on your top posts are a goldmine of audience insight. Don't just count them - read them.

• What specific part of the post did people react to?
• What follow-up questions are they asking? These are perfect ideas for future content.
• Is the sentiment overwhelmingly positive? Note the emotions people are expressing.

The qualitative feedback from your community can often tell you more than the quantitative data alone.

Spy on Your Competitors’ Top Posts (Ethically!)

Knowing what resonates with a shared target audience is priceless. You can get a solid idea of what is working for your competitors by using Facebook’s own tools.

Use the Facebook Ad Library

The Ad Library is a publicly available, searchable database of all active ads on Facebook platforms. If a competitor is spending money to promote a post, it's a strong indicator that the content is performing well for them or targets a core business goal.

1. Go to the Facebook Ad Library.
2. Select a location and choose the "All Ads" category.
3. Type the name of your competitor's Facebook Page into the search bar.

You can now see every ad they are currently running. Pay attention to the ads that have been running the longest - this is often a sign of a successful campaign. Analyze their hooks, visuals, and offers for inspiration.

Manually Review Their Page

It sounds simple, but spending 10 minutes scrolling through a competitor's page can reveal a lot. Sort their posts by "Most Recent" and look for content that has received a noticeably higher number of likes, comments, and shares compared to their average posts. These outliers are their organic winners.

Final Thoughts

Regularly reviewing your top-performing content is one of the highest-impact habits you can build as a social media marketer. By turning analysis into action, you create a feedback loop that consistently improves your content strategy, deepens your audience connection, and drives better results over time.

After finding what resonates with your audience, streamlining the process of planning and scheduling similar content is the next step. At a certain point, manual analysis across different platforms becomes overwhelming. We built Postbase with a clean, unified analytics dashboard that helps you quickly see what's working across all your connected accounts - Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and more - all in one place. It helps us spend less time hunting for data and more time creating the content we know our audience will love.