A Standford University study, conducted with the cooperation of Facebook, was written up in a BuzzFeed.com article entitled The Number Facebook Doesn’t Want You to See.
That article inspired a response from Lars Backstrom who works at Facebook and wanted to address the implication that Facebook is hiding numbers from people.
Perhaps Facebook is hiding something, but also doing us a huge favor by keeping these statistics to themselves; perhaps, they are keeping us all from devolving into the sad life of Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman.
In this Arthur Miller play, the character Willy Loman believes, and tries to instill into his sons, that one can rise to the top simply by being well liked. “ …the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want“, Willy declares.
The study of 220,000 Facebook users by Stanford University discovered that the, “.… fraction of friends that see a post among users is 34%…“. This is not catastrophic news, as the study found that “approximately 60% of a typical user’s friends will see at least one of their posts in a month“.
This is slightly comforting to those people who wonder why no one “liked” their brilliant post, or their adorable pictures. It might relieve those who felt they were being ignored, and that their unique and valuable input into the online world of Facebook is simply not being seen….but these people are in the minority.
The reality is, the vast majority of people significantly underestimate the size of their audience – the number of people who actually do see a post. For these self-assured people, comfortable in their skin, and confident in who they are, realistically believing that not everyone sees their Facebook post, it’s sort of bad news – you are being ignored.
The Stanford University study speculated as to why most people underestimate the size of their audience, and found that these confident, realistic folk were building in their own rationale as to why some of their brilliant observations were not being “liked” by friends, family, co-workers, and those people they have only met once in their life but are now “friends” on Facebook.
“For these posts without feedback, it might be more comfortable to believe that nobody saw it than to believe that many saw it but nobody liked it.”….but the sad truth is, more people saw it then you thought, and nobody ‘liked’ it.”
Just as sad, there’s an over 30% chance that the ignored post on Facebook, will never be remembered as eye-tracking studies have shown that users only remember 69% of posts that they see.
In his reply to the Buzzfeed.com article, Lars Backstrom replied that people don’t care and don’t want to know how many users in their Facebook network actually saw a specific post.
“The main premise of the article — that everyone wants to know how many friends see each of their posts and Facebook doesn’t want to tell them — is just plain wrong“, wrote Backstrom.
Facebook does show the number of people who actually see a post, but only for the administrators of Groups or Pages. “That’s because these people care about how many people see these posts; everyday users — not so much“
It seems some folk take exception with Backstrom’s assertion that everyday people are not interested in knowing the number of people who see an actual post – the same information available to Page owners or Group admins. Other folks feel that Facebook is already growing cumbersome with numerous settings and options, and another one will add to the clutter.
It’s a lose-lose proposition for Facebook to disclose this number to individual everyday users. Will you stop using Facebook if you find you are speaking to an empty room and no one is seeing your post? Will you stop using Facebook if you know you are being ignored, not being “liked”?
Perhaps Facebook, with all it’s faults, with it’s invasion of privacy, perhaps in this instance they are actually saving us from ourselves. Instead of becoming tragic figure like Willy Loman obsessed with being “liked”, Facebook is encouraging us to be a little more like Willy’s son, Biff Loman….
“I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw — the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time to sit…. Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? What am I doing…making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am!”
Submitted by Charles McCormick