Eight questions about how you post. No account, no connected profiles, nothing to install. You get a letter grade, the reason for it, and the one change worth making first.
Takes about 60 seconds · nothing to connect
The guide
What a social media grade actually measures
Every score on this page comes from five things. None of them are secret, and none of them need special tools to check. This is what each one is, why it carries the weight it does, and what good looks like.
30
Volume
How often you post
25
Video
How much of it moves
20
Channels
How many places it lands
15
Ratio
How much is about you
10
Formats
How many shapes you use
What a social media grade is, and what it is not
A social media grade is a measure of how you post, not of how you did. That distinction is the whole point. Follower counts, likes and view counts are outcomes: they tell you what already happened, they arrive too late to act on, and they are heavily influenced by things you do not control. The inputs are different. How often you post, what form it takes, where it lands and what it is about are all decisions you make on a Monday morning, and they are the only part of the system you can change directly.
That is also why this grader asks you eight questions instead of asking to read your account. Connecting a profile would let a tool report your reach back to you, which you can already see. It would not tell you why the number is what it is. The five inputs below explain far more of the variance than any engagement metric will, and you can answer all of them from memory.
How often should a business post on social media
Once a day, on every channel you run. That is the honest answer, and it is higher than most businesses expect. The reason is not that audiences want more from you. It is that the systems deciding who sees your work need a reliable signal to work from, and an account posting twice a week gives them almost nothing to go on.
There is a practical floor too. Feeds move fast enough that any single post reaches a fraction of the people who follow you. At once a week, a follower may go a month without seeing you at all, and the relationship quietly ends without either party noticing. At once a day, you are simply present, and presence is most of what people mean when they say a brand feels established.
Thirty posts a month is the number worth aiming at. Twice that is better and is where the most competitive accounts sit, but the difference between one a week and one a day is far larger than the difference between one a day and two.
What good looks like
Seven posts a week, one a day, on each channel you run
Roughly thirty a month, every month, without gaps in the busy ones
The same cadence held for a year, not a strong quarter followed by silence
Short video is the only format currently being pushed to people who do not follow the account that made it. Every major platform is competing for the same attention, and all of them have decided that short vertical video is how they win it. That means a video has two audiences available to it, your followers and everybody else, while a single image has one.
This is a temporary state of affairs and it is worth saying so. It has been true for several years and shows no sign of ending soon, but it is a decision the platforms made and could unmake. What is not temporary is the underlying point: at any given moment there is one format being actively distributed, and being on it is worth more than being good at the formats that are not.
The practical version is simpler than it sounds. Most of what a business already posts is a script. A price explanation, a common question, a job you just finished. Saying those out loud over the same photos, on camera, will out-travel the written version by a wide margin, and it takes about the same time to make.
Cross-posting, and why one channel is never enough
The expensive part of social media is making the thing. Once a video exists, putting it on a fourth platform costs a few minutes and reaches an entirely separate audience. Businesses that post to one channel are choosing to throw away three quarters of the return on work they have already paid for.
There is a second, less obvious advantage. The platforms are not equally crowded in every category or every town. A field that is saturated on one channel is often close to empty on another, and being one of the few businesses of your type posting consistently to that quieter platform is a position that is genuinely hard for anyone to take from you later.
Four channels is the number worth aiming at. Beyond that the returns thin out and the admin does not, unless someone else is running it.
Where to start
Instagram and TikTok for reach into people who do not know you
YouTube Shorts, which is the least crowded of the three in most categories
Facebook, which is still where the buying audience is in a lot of local trades
LinkedIn only if you sell to businesses, where it outperforms all of the above
The ratio: three useful posts for every one about you
The single most common mistake is an account that reads like a catalogue. Every post is a listing, an offer, a finished job or a team photo. It is an understandable instinct, because those are the posts that feel like marketing, and it caps your reach at the number of people already interested in buying from you.
The posts that reach strangers are the ones useful to someone with the problem you solve, months before they are ready to call anyone. A roofer explaining how to tell hail damage from age. A dentist on what actually causes sensitivity. An agent walking through what a home inspection will find. None of those mention the business, and all of them are the reason a stranger follows an account they had never heard of.
Roughly three useful posts to every one about your own business is the ratio worth working to. The useful posts build the audience. The fourth one is what that audience is for.
Formats: why the same shape stops working
A format is the shape of a post, not its subject. Before and after. A straight answer to a question you get asked constantly. A price broken down. A myth in your field corrected. A day in the life. The subject changes every time; the shape repeats, which is what makes a calendar possible to run.
Running one shape repeatedly fails in two directions at once. People who have seen it stop stopping, and the systems testing your work on new audiences have only one thing to test. A rotation of five or six formats gives you a year of posting that never quite repeats, and it means a format going cold costs you a fifth of your output rather than all of it.
The two that work in nearly any field are before and after, and the answer to a question you get asked weekly. If a rotation has to start somewhere, start there.
The order to fix things in
The dimensions are not equal and they are not independent, so the order matters more than the list. Volume first, because everything else multiplies against it: a perfect post that goes out twice a month is still going out twice a month. Then video, then channels, both of which take work that already exists and get more out of it. The ratio and the formats come last, not because they do not matter, but because they are refinements to a machine that has to be running before they change anything.
It is worth being honest about what that sequence costs. Daily posting, on four channels, mostly video, in a real rotation of formats, is somewhere between a serious part-time job and a full-time one. Most businesses that score badly on this card are not badly run. They are run by people who have a business to operate, and the posting is the thing that loses when the week gets short.
In order
Get to one post a day before optimising anything else
Move the still posts to video
Put every post on four channels instead of one
Shift the balance to three useful posts for every one about you
Yes, and there is nothing to install or connect. You answer eight questions about how you post and the grade is worked out in your browser. The full report card asks for an email address so we can send you a copy.
Do I have to connect my Instagram or TikTok account?
No, and that is deliberate. Nothing is read from your accounts and no login is involved. The grade comes from the eight answers you give, all of which you can answer from memory.
How is the grade calculated?
Five dimensions, weighted by how much each one moves reach: how often you post is worth 30 points, how much of it is video 25, how many channels you post to 20, the ratio of promotional to useful posts 15, and how many distinct formats you rotate 10. The scores add to a mark out of 100, which becomes a letter.
How often should a small business post on social media?
Once a day on each channel you run, which works out at roughly thirty posts a month. That is higher than most businesses expect. The gap between posting once a week and once a day matters far more than the gap between once a day and twice.
Why did I get a low grade when my content is good?
That is the most common result on this page, and it usually is not a content problem. The rubric weights volume and distribution heavily, so an account making genuinely good video twice a week on one channel will score low while getting an A on the video row. The card is designed to show that difference rather than hide it.
Does follower count affect the grade?
No. Followers are an outcome rather than a behaviour, and grading them would mark down a good new account and flatter a stale old one. We ask for a rough number only to frame the result.
What is a good social media score?
Anything above 78 is a B or better and means the habits that matter are in place. Most businesses that take this land between 40 and 60, which is a D, and almost always because of volume rather than quality.