AN EXPERIMENT ON WHO I GET TO SEE FIRST ON FACEBOOK

  Do you have any say on what shows up on your Facebook page?

I've known for years that you can pick out 30 favorite people/pages to "see first". Yet I'm not sure that it accomplished its goal.

One of my friends (FB and real life) a couple of times asked if I got notifications of his posts, because he had a suspicion that Facebook was not posting notifications of his posts, and his political ones in particular.

So I decided to do a little experiment. I selected 30 friends and pages as "See First" (or Favorites). Then, I would at one point go once a day through the first fifteen news updates and see how many of the thirty were among the top 15. The make-up was 12 people and 18 pages (i.e. promoting a band or a news source). 

My goal was to do this for seven days. I decided to stop after six days, because I believe the following conclusions would not have been affected.

So here are the results.

•  Of the 90 posts I saw, 21 were from "See First" sources. Another 18 were ads. This leaves 51 from people who were not on my "See First" list.
• The daily numbers of my 30 "See First" being among the first 15 I viewed were 7 (Monday), 1 (Tuesday), 4 (Wednesday), 5 (Thursday), 4 (Friday), and Zero (Saturday).
• None of those 21 posts were from pages. This is the week of Annie Armstrong Easter Offering and thus there were several posts about it on the Baptist Press and North American Mission Board pages, but none of them showed up on my newsfeed. One of the pages was for a local Christian rock band I'm following; the lead singer is also on my friend's list. You might call this cheating, but after I saw several for the singer, I switched from the band page to her page. 
• The 21 posts were from seven of the twelve friends I included (6 from one, 4 from one, 3 from three, and 1 each from two) . Four out of the five that I lacked posts from didn't post anything this week, so it was understandable. By the way, there are two other friends who were not on my list of 30 that I saw several posts in the top 15.
• Was politics an issue? Three posts had a political theme. Two of the friends I've included lean Libertarian: one of those had one post on my wall, which happened to be non-political, and the other didn't have any posts though he did post some this week (which surprisingly or not was the one who I referred to above, who wondered if his political posts were not being promoted by Facebook). I also included a political cartoonist, and only one of his posts made my top 15.
  
• I will also add that the ads were in character to my regular postings and messages from friends. I told you I didn't get any from a pair of Southern Baptist pages, but several of the ads I got were from another Southern Baptist ministry. 

So what does this mean? Well...

1. Before this experiment, I doubted my friend's political posts were deliberately not shared on his friends' walls. Now, I'm not so sure. No proof, but I did find it interesting to see the lack of political posts, and wonder if I leaned liberal if I'd see more posts.
2. I was always curious that I didn't get a lot of posts from wall pages I followed (e.g. Reformed Thug Life). Now, I conclude that it is that they put the weight on friends, not on pages, which I'm not going to complain about.
3. Facebook doesn't put a priority on those you want to give priority to. Is there priority based on anything other than who posts more? Probably not. 

Now, I can try this again with various variations. I can make the 30 ones that are more active. I may divide those 30 into religious and political. I may include a more liberal friend and see if his posts show up more often than ones who are more conservative.  

 

 Have you noticed any trends that agree or disagree with my observations?