How many of your friends see your Facebook posts?
Posted: March 24th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms | Tags: Edgerank, eyeballs, Facebook, likes, views | Comments OffI tried out the “10% of your friends see your posts & 1% like ‘em” experiment, because I’m pretty curious about the way top content is selected in Facebook & wanted to see Edgerank—Facebook’s scoring system for that selection—in action.
Responses = 26% of friends.
This is a lot higher than average. Which may mean:
- Nicer, chattier friends who respond to requests like this, or
- My posts are showing up a lot because
- I interact on Facebook “more than average”, or
- The amount of action on the post kept it visible
- I interact on Facebook “more than average”, or
The last comment came in 19 hours after the original post, suggesting it was dropped from ‘top news’ at that point.
The experiment is predicated on the goodwill & motivation of your friends, and is pretty much gaming ‘top content’, which is partly selected on amount of interaction a post receives. I also garnered 18 comments, which are weighed more heavily by Facebook Edgerank than likes are.
Two friends who ran the experiment got 10.3% + 4 comments and 2.2% + 6 comments respectively.
I’m not sure what this experiment proves beyond the 10% eyeballs theory isn’t always accurate, and that my friends are really nice.
Edgerank, if you’re curious (& I don’t pretend to know everything about this), is a mix of these factors:
- Recency - which is not a word; can you believe that? Consider it coined. Newer = more weight
- Interaction - more likes = more weight; more comments = even more weight
- Affinity – the more you’ve interacted in the past with the person who posted, the more likely you are to see their stuff again. Facebook took this one way too far recently, but the concept makes sense. in a please-mediate-my-world-for-me kind of way.
