How the Hype Score works
A score from 0 to 100 for how much buzz a brand has on Instagram right now, ranked against every other brand we monitor. It is built from the posts our searches found, which are a sample and never a platform total.
A rank, not a count
We cannot give you the true number of posts about a brand this month, because our searches see a slice of what is posted (how we count explains why). What a slice can do is compare: two brands looked at the same way can be ranked. So each of the five measures below becomes a percentile among the brands we monitor, and the Hype Score is their weighted average. A score of 70 reads as ahead of about 70% of them.
The five measures
| Measure | Weight | What it reads |
|---|---|---|
| Posting rate | 30% | How many posts a day turn up on the brand's own hashtag. |
| For its size | 25% | That rate per 10,000 followers, so a small brand with people talking about it can beat a giant coasting on its name. Needs a follower reading of 1,000 or more. |
| Momentum | 20% | The latest week's rate against the brand's own previous four weeks, pulled toward no change when there are only a few searches to compare. |
| Creators | 15% | Different accounts posting, per day. Ten posts from ten people is more buzz than ten from one fan. |
| Tone | 10% | Positive minus critical labels over 90 days. Below 8 labelled posts it counts as neutral. |
When a measure is missing (no follower reading, or no earlier search to compare momentum with) it drops out and the others carry its weight. Nothing is filled in with an estimate.
Adjusted for how often we look
A brand on a dashboard is searched every few days, a quieter brand every week or two, and each search returns one page of recent posts. Counting the posts we stored would rank brands by our own schedule. So the score never counts stored posts. It reads each search on its own: a page holding 3 posts from the past week means about 3 in 7 days; a full page whose newest 10 posts span 2 days means about 5 a day. The brand's rate is the average over its searches in 30 days, which comes out the same whether we looked daily or fortnightly. The same goes for creators and momentum.
Only the search every monitored brand gets is used: its own hashtag. Extra keywords, tagged posts, phrase and campaign searches, TikTok and Reddit are given to some brands and not others, so they stay on the brand page and out of the score.
Who gets a score
Brands we monitor actively: on anyone's dashboard, or read often enough to be searched weekly or more. Restaurants are ranked against restaurants. Each needs 2 searches and 3 recent posts in 30 days; below that the gauge is not shown. Scores are worked out once a day, and the week-on-week change compares with the score seven days earlier.
Reading the dial
0 to 19 is very quiet, 20 to 39 is quiet, 40 to 59 is steady, 60 to 79 is buzzing, 80 to 100 is hot. The bands are labels for the same ranking, nothing more. Every monitored brand's score is on the stats page.
Questions about the Hype Score
Is a Hype Score of 80 twice as much buzz as 40?
No. The score is a ranking, not a quantity. 80 means that across the five measures the brand is ahead of roughly 80% of the brands we monitor; 40 means roughly 40%. Two brands can be far apart in posts and close in score, or the other way round.
Does a brand we search more often get a higher score?
No, and that is the point of the method. Each search is read as an estimate of how fast posts appear on the brand's own hashtag, so a brand we look at every day and one we look at every two weeks read the same rate when the same is being posted. More searches only make the estimate steadier.
Why does a brand have no score?
It needs at least 2 searches and 3 recent posts found in the last 30 days, and it has to be one we monitor actively: on someone's dashboard, or read often enough to be searched weekly or more. Below that the page shows a dash, not a guess.
Is the Hype Score a measure of sentiment?
Mostly not. Tone is one input out of five, at 10%, and only counts once a brand has 8 labelled posts. A brand everyone is arguing about can score high.