Here’s What Meta Says Is In Your Newsfeed
Meta has a website labeled as its “Transparency Center.” It’s a place where the social media/tech conglomerate issues report to tell its users what the company is up to in terms of privacy, data, etc.
Here’s a descriptor for it on the site:
“Meta regularly publishes reports to give our community visibility into community standards enforcement, government requests, and internet disruptions.”
The company issued a Q2 report called, ‘Widely Viewed Content Report: What People See on Facebook.’ As someone who has used Facebook since 2004 when you had to have a college email address to join, and as someone who today works in a marketing-related field, I was very curious to gaze inside this report.
Here’s the biggest takeaway:
Meta says people mostly see content from friends in their Facebook feeds
We all know people who complain about the Facebook newsfeed being full of random content. Recently, Meta faced even more criticism from users who are accusing the company of trying to make Facebook and Instagram look more like TikTok. I know that personally, my Facebook feed seems to include more suggested algorithm-fed content than it used to. That’s why the company recently launched the “home” and “feed” tabs on the app. I started using the “feeds” tab instead of “home” for my personal scrolling. It looks like this is just another Facebook change that will take some getting used to.
Take a look at the graphic chart from Meta breaking down Q2 content:
The chart for “Source of Feed Content Views In The United States” shows that 31% of newsfeed content comes from friends! 20% comes from friends resharing something, 19.4% comes from groups with the rest coming mostly from page followers or unconnected people.
What does this mean for businesses?
Well, I suppose we don’t really know yet. It could mean potentially more organic eyes on your company if you create and share user-generated content (UGC) that’s interesting enough to wow the algorithms. It also tells us that Facebook Groups may be worth the effort if you can devote the time to creating and nourishing a solid community.
But there was something else in the Q2 Transparency Center Report that might give us better insights into effective content posting for business on Facebook.
90.2% of Feed views in Q2 did not include a link to a source outside of Facebook. That suggests that linking to your company page might not be the most effective means of reaching your audience on Facebook.
The report breaks down content further by including data on posts and links that were viewed the most in Feeds. Youtube was the most viewed domain followed by other magazines and news sites: Daily Mail, NBC News, CBS News, NY Post, CNN, PEOPLE, NYTimes, ABC News, TODAY.com, and Variety were all in the top 20 “most viewed” domains.
A PR Takeaway
Rather than simply showing us how people are using social media, this tells us what they are seeing on Facebook (despite how they might feel about it). Public Relations experts, like those at Orca Communications, are keeping their finger on the pulse of what’s trending. This shows us the power of user-generated content, the continued importance of word-of-mouth comments and shares from friends, and which websites have the most power on the social media platform.
Want to read the full Meta report for yourself along with all of the nitty-gritty details about how they collected all the data for it? Click HERE to see it.