Widely Viewed Content – This Is What People Actually See On Facebook
If you listen to all the news reports, Facebook users are inundated with misinformation posts mostly coming from foreign entities. As so much in the news, something that is actually a minor issue may be made out to be a far larger problem than it really is. That’s what Facebook would like you to believe, and that’s what its Widely Viewed Content Report spells out. Keep in mind that the data is for the United States during Q3 2021 only.
What Users See
As the graphic at the top of the page shows, the vast majority of what a Facebook user sees in his/her newsfeed comes from friends and people followed, groups joined, and pages followed. Only about 13% comes from posts outside of the user’s immediate circle.
The study shows that 52% of all content viewed doesn’t even have a link, and posts from news organizations only account for 0.3% of all posts that a typical user sees.
The top 10 domains accessed from Facebook are also way different than you might believe. Not only that, it only amounts to around 2% of the total views on the platform.
| Rank | Domain | Content Viewers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | youtube.com | 183.8M |
| 2 | gofundme.com | 132.0M |
| 3 | amazon.com | 131.7M |
| 4 | media1.tenor.co | 124.7M |
| 5 | twitter.com | 118.8M |
| 6 | unicef.org | 111.1M |
| 7 | linktr.ee | 102.9M |
| 8 | tiktok.com | 99.4M |
| 9 | abcnews.go.com | 98.2M |
| 10 | cdc.gov | 97.8M |
The most widely viewed pages on Facebook only accounts for 1% of the viewership. Yet, they’re not what you expect.
| Rank | Page Link | Page Name | Content Viewers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | facebook.com/376347092480657 | Thinkarete lifestyle | 140.9M |
| 2 | facebook.com/229283250455260 | 96.9 The Eagle KKGL | 133.2M |
| 3 | facebook.com/100044603911781 | Moore or Less Cooking Blog | 128.9M |
| 4 | facebook.com/100044314755323 | Kitchen Fun With My 3 Sons | 127.9M |
| 5 | facebook.com/68793499001 | UNICEF | 125.3M |
| 6 | facebook.com/157682947576349 | 101.9 KISS FM | 121.4M |
| 7 | facebook.com/102845731859490 | That ain’t right | 112.6M |
| 8 | facebook.com/107504660991761 | Meme Feed | 111.9M |
| 9 | facebook.com/175750359224528 | LADbible Australia | 109.1M |
| 10 | facebook.com/244713198899996 | Do You Remember When | 108.2M |
Take notice that 3 of the top 10 are radio stations!
The Caveat
While Facebook is said to have 2.91 billion users worldwide, it only has 261 million active users in the U.S. and Canada. It looks like the unsolicited news feed material is mostly junk, but that doesn’t mean there’s no danger there. For one thing, even if only a small niche of users sees some of the misinformation posts that are pumped out, that’s still a significant enough number of users to cause many of the problems we’re seeing.
Probably the biggest elephant in the room is how much to trust this information, since it comes directly from Facebook and not a third party. As we’ve recently seen, the company is not above cherry-picking and repressing data to make itself look good.
But if these numbers are even in the ballpark it’s good news for artists and bands, since it means that your competition for engagement is less likely to come from a major news entity or brand than from someone else in the industry.
