When it comes to Facebook and the content that’s shown to you as a user, many people believe that the algorithm just hates showing them anything their friends post, the actual Pages they follow or the Groups they’re members of.
Most people believe all that they are shown are Ads after Ads after Ads. When honestly and objectively–That’s just not the case at all.
Taking into account you are the person that set up your account. Followed those Pages and became members of those Groups, it wouldn’t be in Facebook’s best interest to only show you Ads from brands that have paid them to place their Ads on their platform, regardless of how much money they make off of those.
If you the user/viewer is not on their platform for the reasons you want to be. Then there is no one on Facebook to see the Ads those brands paid to place on their platform.
And the reason you’re on Facebook is to see what your friends and family are up to, catching up with the latest gossip from your school years, or even checking out what your co-workers did the night before at the bar you passed on going to.
Now, we can sit here all day long and tell you that yes, Facebook does run Ads on their platform and they make a LOT of money off of those Ads. However, when you actually put the leg work in (which we did for you) you’ll see that you actually see more of the content you’re on their platform to see than you think.
And of course, we have the numbers to back this claim up. Let’s dive into those right now!
Meta’s Transparency Center recently published a report titled, ‘Widely Viewed Content Report: What People See on Facebook’.
The Widely Viewed Content Report aims to provide more transparency and context about what people are seeing on Facebook by sharing the most-viewed domains, links, Pages and posts for a given quarter on Feed in the United States. They [Meta] provide insights into the various content types that appear on Feed to help people better understand our distribution systems and how they influence the content people see on Facebook.
The report goes on to say:
By far, the most common experience in Feed for people in the US is to see posts without links, from their friends, or from Groups they’ve joined.
Where most Feed views come from
In Q4 '21, 86.8% of views came from posts shared by people’s friends, from Groups people had joined, or Pages they had followed (see breakdown below). Of the remaining 13.2% of Feed content views in the US during Q4 2021, 10.7% came from Feed recommendations, which show people content from sources they are not connected to, but we think they might be interested in; we refer to this content as ‘unconnected posts’. The last 2.5% came from less common products, such as Events, and logging discrepancies.
Now that’s great that they [Meta] are sharing this type of information with us on what exactly is being shown to you on Facebook. However, we wanted to put this to the test, so we did our own research with a Personal Facebook Profile and scrolled through over 1,000 posts just to see how their numbers measured out against our real world test.
Here are our results!
- Posts from Friends - 510
- Posts from Pages - 220
- Posts from Groups - 160
- Advertisements - 120
Now as you can see, we saw 510 posts from Friends on Facebook. That’s 50.5% of the 1,010 Facebook Posts we scrolled for this study. So over half of the posts were posts from Friends.
220 or 21.8% came from Pages we Follow. 160, 15.8% came from Groups we are Members of and only 120 or 11.9% were actually Paid Advertisements run by brands on Facebook.