Facebook has released its quarterly widely viewed content report. The report shows what types of content users share the most, giving an idea of what type of content works well in the Facebook algorithm.
Most of the Facebook content is unrelated
It seems that getting traffic from Facebook is not what it used to be. Views from your Facebook feed tend to stay on Facebook.
Facebook feed views that included a link accounted for only 14.6% of the views. The vast majority of Facebook feed views (85.4%) did not include a link.
Additionally, when a post includes a link, that link tends to come from a Facebook page that a Facebook member is following.
When Facebook members viewed a post with a link, only 2.5% of those posts were from friends and affiliated people, which is generally considered to be reliable sources.
Of the rest of the linked posts that received views, 1.2% came from groups the member joined, 7.7% from pages the members follow, and 3% from posts that were not connected to the members.
The majority of posts (48.6%) without links that appeared on Facebook in members’ feeds were created by friends and people they follow. The rest came from groups (18.5%), followed by pages (8.4%), offline posts (7.7%) and what Facebook calls “others” (2.3%).
Long tail Facebook content without the head
When reading, listening, researching, or buying habits are compared, there is always a large concentration of people who read the same books, listen to the same music, search for the same things, and buy the same products.
But there are also not very common books, music, searches and purchases.
When reading, watching, listening, and buying habits are organized into a graph, the graph has a huge cluster on the left side and then a long falling line moving to the right that represents millions upon millions of individuals with unique and uncommon viewing, buying, and listening habits.
The group that tends to do the same is called the head. The huge group of individuals with unfamiliar tastes is called long-tailed.
When it comes to Google, 15% of search queries are uncommon. But when it comes to the links people see in their Facebook feeds, only 0.1% of the top feed content views came from the top 20 sites outside of Facebook.
What that means is that most people don’t see the same thing on Facebook.
When it comes to what people watch on TV, a large percentage of the audience watches the same thing, which means they consume header content.
But for the Facebook ecosystem, people see different things to the extent that no external website can achieve massive popularity the way movies, music, and TV shows do.
An interesting fact shared in the report is that all Facebook members are exposed to content that is unique to them.
No content was able to reach all members and achieve a dominant level of popularity.
Facebook explains:
“…While our most viewed content may have a very large number of content viewers, as measured as a percentage of all viewers of Facebook content, they are only a small fraction of all Feed views in the US at that Quarter. In short, it is not uncommon for different people to see the same content in their feed.”
Facebook noted:
“…While our most viewed content may have a very large number of content viewers, as measured as a percentage of all viewers of Facebook content, they are only a small fraction of all Feed views in the US at that quarter.
In short, it is not uncommon for different people to see the same content on their feed.”
Of the top 20 most popular links on Facebook, only three went to news sites and one link (#16) no longer exists because Facebook removed the link for violating its Community Standards (after it had been viewed nearly 28 million times).
Most Viewed Facebook Pages
Contrary to how things work in the real world, in the Facebook world no Facebook page has been able to get such a huge number of followers in the USA.
The top 20 Facebook Pages in the last quarter of 2021 represent just 1.1% of all Facebook Pages.
Among the 20 most popular Facebook pages, the first page on Facebook was removed for violating the Community Standards. This breach page received more than 121.8 million views before it was removed from Facebook.
The majority of the top 20 Facebook pages were about recipes, cute animals, TV nostalgia, and other mostly trashy pages that seemed to indicate that people on Facebook wanted to have fun or amuse themselves with articles with titles like, Woman Can’t Stand Every Time Daughter Visits Boyfriend Because they “need constant attention” and web pages show videos of a pug bathing and pictures of a pair of French bulldogs mouth-to-mouth as if kissing.
Our Top 20 Facebook Pages list paints a picture of Americans addicted to Facebook getting a quick endorphin shot from pages offering “Daily Dose Of Woof Woof.”
Here is a list of the top 20 Facebook pages:
- This page has been removed by Facebook for violating our Community Standards.
- thinkrite
- WomenWorking.com
- Do you remember when
- Newsner
- LADBible Australia
- dodo
- 3 a.m. thoughts
- 97.1 QMG
- Eric Alper
- he is
- Sarcastic honey
- Kitchen fun with my three sons
- requester
- UNILAD
- Fans of Patri Sathi
- Tila
- Daily Mail Video
- Lessons learned at Life Inc.
- Selindy Bae GH
Most viewed Facebook posts
Similar to the statistics on links and pages, there was not a single Facebook post that could go viral and be seen by the majority of Facebook members.
The top 20 Facebook posts accounted for just 0.1% of all Facebook content views. The posts people saw on their Facebook feeds were very different for most people.
Lots of Top 20 trivial content, like a 9-second video of a man using a vacuum-like device to pull and rip off a mole on his neck. This video was the fourth most popular post on Facebook for the fourth quarter of 2021 and was viewed 57.4 million times.
Screenshot of the fourth most popular Facebook post
The sixth most popular Facebook post in the last quarter of 2021 is a six-second video of an angry woman splashing a drink in a man’s face.
This is eerily similar to the movie Idiocracy which depicts residents so bored they go to the movies to watch a 90 minute fart of a man on the butt end.
Watch Facebook content widely
Perhaps the biggest benefit is that posts that didn’t link to another site vastly outnumbered posts that did link to another site.
The next most interesting finding is that there are no world-famous Facebook pages and posts. Most people see a unique news feed on Facebook.
The final conclusion from the Facebook report is that Americans seem to seek distractions.
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