The Response Time describes how long a page needs to respond to userposts. For this value, we only take into account when a page makes a comment to a userpost. This is mainly because Facebook does not provide time values for likes and shares. We first calculate the response time for each userpost and then take the median of all posts for the selected period of time. The median is the value, that is exactly in the middle of all values, when you sort them.
Example: Page A from our previous example reacts within the following timeframes:
Userpost 1: commented by page after 10 minutes (0.17h),
Userpost 2: commented by page after 45 minutes (0.75h),
Userpost 3: commented by page after 2 hours (2h),
Userpost 4: commented by page after 20 hours (20h),
Userpost 5: commented by page after 53 minutes (0.88h)
If you sort all durations you get the following list: 0.17h, 0.75h, 0.88h, 2.00h, 20.00h
The value in the middle is 0.88h, so the Response Time is 0.88 hours.
Why don’t we take the average of all values? The average has two problems: First of all, the average is very prone to overevaluate outliers. In our example, one post was responded to only after 20 hours. If you calculated the average of the values, you would get to 4.76 hours. This is much higher than you would think fair if you looked at the other posts. Secondly, these 4.76 hours are a completely fictive value, whereas the 0.88 hours of the median can be clearly and correctly explained to any interested party (your boss or client) as: “Half of all userposts are responded to in less than 0.88 hours.”