It is often mistaken that Facebook posts which are most liked are also most viewed by the users on the platform.
According to Facebook’s Head of News Feed, John Hegeman, real data on actual reach is available only with the social network and it is exploring ways to incorporate it into its publicly available tools. This implies posts that get the most engagement are actually seen by a small percentage of users, reported Timesnownews.com.
“While some link posts get a lot of interactions, likes or comments, this content is a tiny % of what most people see on FB. News from these Pages don’t represent the most-viewed news stories on FB, either,” Hegeman replied to The New York Times columnist Kevin Roose via a tweet.
Roose this week shared data from content discovery and social monitoring platform CrowdTangle with his users, showing top-performing Facebook link posts by US pages.
However, Hegeman stepped in, saying that the data does not represent what most people see on Facebook. “CrowdTangle calculates interactions, not impressions, which is the number of ppl who see posts. Pages in these lists see high engagement because followers, or those interacting with the posts, are passionate. But it shouldn’t be confused with what’s most popular,” he explained.
“Right now this data is only available internally and we are exploring ways to incorporate it into our publicly available tools,” he informed. Moreover, to reinforce his point, Hegeman also shared some data on authoritative sources on COVID information like from UNICEF that get more amplification by Facebook and reach a bigger audience.
