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Many marketers and businesses use Facebook to connect with potential customers, and that shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, the platform has roughly 2.89 billion active users per month.
Those who use Facebook for the purposes mentioned above may be curious to know what the site’s users actually see – and now, there’s a report that offers that information.
Last week, Facebook published the ‘Widely Viewed Content Report’ as part of its Transparency Centre blog. The report offers insights to help readers understand what kind of content is more likely to appear in a user’s Facebook newsfeed.
“Transparency is an important part of everything we do at Facebook,” the company said in the report’s overview. “In this first quarterly report, our goal is to provide clarity around what people see in their Facebook News Feed, the different content types that appear in their Feed and the most-viewed domains, links, Pages and posts on the platform during the quarter.”
Specifically, the report includes views of public content in the U.S. between April 1, 2021 and June 30, 2021. It does not look at what users do outside of their newsfeed – say, on Facebook Marketplace or other areas.
Notable Findings
The report defines a ‘view’ as any instance where content appears on a user’s newsfeed – the user does not have to interact with the content in any way for a view to be counted.
The report shares that posts with no links are far more likely to be viewed than those with links. Specifically, 87.1% of posts viewed have no link.
One section in the report shows the top twenty web domains that are viewed on newsfeeds. Youtube ranked the highest, with Amazon, Unicef, GoFundMe, and Twitter following.
The report also includes lists of the most viewed web links, Facebook pages, and Facebook posts. Notably, almost all of the ten most viewed posts were posts that challenged readers to respond (i.e. “What is something you will never eat, no matter how hungry you get?”) The only exception is the sixth most viewed post: U.S. President Joe Biden’s post that reads, “100 days in—and America is getting back on track.”
Facebook plans to share similar reports in the future, with a possibility of this being a quarterly offering.
