Hi everyone! I work for a local municipality and help oversee the strategy for 20+ social media accounts across different departments.
Each month, I report to our executive team on the previous month’s top‑performing posts. Recently, they’ve asked for more context, specifically average impressions per post, average clicks, average shares, and so on.
Here’s where I’m stuck: How do you account for viral or unusually high‑performing posts when reporting through Sprout Social? I know I can exclude posts using tags, but I’m trying to figure out the best way to define what counts as “viral” so I can set a consistent baseline.
Our accounts vary a lot, which makes this tricky. For example:
-
In 2026, our Police Department had 16 Facebook posts with 300K+ views and 27 with 200K+ views out of 367 total posts.
-
Meanwhile, our City Hall account only had two posts above 200K views out of 194 total, but one of those hit 2.4M views.
My goal is to exclude anything that is clearly out of the ordinary so our averages aren’t skewed, but with so many different account types and audiences, it’s hard to determine what “out of the ordinary” actually means. I’m also trying to build a definition that won’t require a ton of manual work each month, so a method that is easy to repeat would be ideal.
