What People Actually See on Facebook

What each of us sees as we scroll through our newsfeeds is unique, which makes it very difficult for us as marketers to understand what our audiences are seeing, and in what context our posts appear. There has also been a lot of controversy and misinformation about Meta’s algorithms and the types of content it has been promoting.

That’s why Meta’s quarterly transparency report is so interesting, and we’ve broken down the most important takeaways from the latest version.

First, a quick summary:

• Meta is clearly deprioritizing political content — None of the most popular posts directly relate to a political party or candidate
• Small businesses are breaking through — 6 of the 20 most popular posts were from local brands
• None of the most popular content came from big brands
• Less than a third of people’s content comes from their Friends — The rest comes from recommendations, re-shares, and Groups
• Only 3.5% of posts that appeared in feeds included a link

Here are the parts of the report that caught our eyes:

A breakdown of where content came from

You’ll likely notice that the “Page Follower” category doesn’t appear to make it onto the pie chart. It turns out that posts coming directly from Pages make up an incredibly tiny fraction of the content people see, and the brands that are breaking through are doing it when people share their posts with friends and Groups.

The most viewed links

The most popular links shared in Q1 are generally unsurprising, except that Meta has been doing everything it can to encourage people to share their videos directly to Facebook, and yet links to Youtube & TikTok got more views than any other website.

Beyond that, what we see is that Facebook is for fundraising (GoFundMe), news (CBS, Today, NY Post), and celebrity gossip (TMZ, People).

Small business content

That’s right – cell phone photos of some old wood and a bit of rice at the bottom of a cupcake tray appeared to more than 60 million people. That’s roughly the same number of people who watched the Super Bowl this year.

Why? It appears that a lot of people have strong opinions about the wood used in home construction and the best way to keep your cupcakes from sticking to the pan.

Two takeaways from this section:

1. It is still possible to get business content in front of a huge audience on Facebook
2. The best way to do that is to spark a conversation in the comments

If that breakdown got you curious about what else has been happening on Facebook, check out the full Q1 Meta Transparency Report here.