(This is part 3 of a post I tried to break into a few pieces because it’s too big and interesting to write a novel about. There’s part 1 on revisiting my transmedia dissertation and part 2 on Netflix and independent content producers)
One bit of the Henry Jenkins spreadable media talk had some figures in it and I can’t resist some lovely stats and charts.
Apparently we consume about 26 weekly news stories shared by our friends and (on average) share 13 ourselves. That’s quite a lot if I think about my own facebook posts and the number of people I have following me (the ‘what happens when you make your posts public‘ thing). It makes me happy because it means that the people following me find my stuff interesting or in a worst case scenario they’re just obsessive-compulsive oversharers. I hope not.
So my mind wanders – not going by Dunbar number figures, I think the average person on Facebook has somewhere between 160-180 friends these days. It was true in 2010 when we launched a Facebook game app. If we post around 3 things per day, that means exposure to at least 480 items (‘going to the gym’ updates, pictures of cats, interesting links etc.) every single day in theory. The EdgeRank algorithm will filter that (weight, recency, affinity) into your ‘top news’ that everyone seems to hate just because it’s not recent news.
But anyway, it’s interesting when you think how much time is spent on Facebook daily and factor that in; a while ago the figure was something like 20-22 minutes per session on average. Which is nearly useless because some will probably spend 3 hours on it, some will always see it from mobile, some will only ever use chat and not the rest, some only consume what other people post instead of posting their own. Or variations on the same theme. Too much to know, though I’d love to know.
If in a best case scenario I get 10% of my entire list to like something, I’d imagine the figures are pretty low when you ask the question of ‘who sees your posts’? If it’s true that only 12% of friends see your posts, then the highlighting does make sense. Silly as it may sound.
there are pieces of content you create that are interesting, and there’s some that are not.” And the 12 percent doesn’t just apply to users. Business Pages meanwhile only get 16% of their fans seeing each post, which is why Facebook is launching its new “Reach Generator” to help marketers buy extra distribution of their Page posts on the ads sidebar, in the web and mobile news feed, and even on the logout page.
