What is average likes?
Also called: likes per post
Average likes
The mean number of likes an account's recent posts receive, used as the raw input to engagement rate.
Averages hide their own distribution. An account whose posts get 900, 1,000, and 40,000 likes has an average that describes none of its posts. The 40,000 is a viral outlier and the 1,000 is the real baseline.
It remains useful precisely because it is comparable: every account's average is calculated the same way, which a hand-picked 'best post' is not.
How we calculate it
Taken from an account's recent posts at the time of each profile fetch, and stored with the snapshot so the figure always matches the follower count it sat beside.