14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has spent years finely tuning the algorithms that determine what users see in their feed. Simply pushing every update, like the site did in the early days, isn't feasible and would result in a bad experience.
People are much more interested in seeing stuff they care about than everything their Facebook friends post. That said, the same is not true if you switch roles. Most would like to believe that what they post is seen and, better yet, appreciated by their friends.
Buzzfeed has the results of an interesting study which indicates that people vastly underestimate the number of friends that view their posts.
The study showed that the average post is seen by 35 percent of friends, and that 61 percent of them see at least one post from any of the people they connect with. But that's not what most users believed; the study found that users think three times fewer friends see their posts.
The reason behind the discrepancy is that there's a big difference between how many view a post and how many engage with it, i.e. click the like button or comment.
There are several reasons for this, according to the researchers. The most obvious explanation is that no one wants to believe that what they write isn't popular and would much rather assume that not that many people saw it.
This is why, Buzzfeed believes, the site doesn't show a view count next to posts, like YouTube. The theory makes some sense.
But it's not true, one Facebook engineer says. The company did internal testing to precisely to check whether users wanted a view count and found that the majority is much more interested in how many people engaged with the content and how, rather than how many saw it.
"In all of the thousands of pieces of feedback we receive about News Feed each month, virtually no one has asked to see this information. If we saw enough people asking for this, we would definitely consider building it into the product. But, from what we've seen, including the raw numbers isn't worth the space it would take up on the screen," Lars Backstrom, who works on the News Feed, explained.