Facebook regularly publishes a report on the most-viewed content on its platform in the American market.
This report is very useful for marketing, helping us understand how the algorithm works and which interests and formats are most popular.
The main findings are:
✔️ The most-viewed posts are those without an external link (a full 85.4%). Facebook’s algorithm rewards and gives more visibility to posts that do not take you off its platform (a large share of the remaining percentage contained a link to other pages within Facebook).
For social media managers, this figure matters: sharing an article or a page from a website (with a link, therefore) will have little visibility by the algorithm’s design.
YouTube videos are also among the shares with low reach. Here, the suggestion is to turn them into native Facebook videos whenever possible.
✔️ The top four external sites viewed on Facebook are, in order:
- Youtube.com
- Tiktok.com
- Amazon.com
- Gofundme.com
✔️ The 20 most-viewed Facebook pages account for only 1.1% of all pages.
✔️ The top 20 posts account for only 0.1% of all views.
These last two figures are consistent with other reports and tell us that, over time, the algorithm has generated great variation in feed output. In practice, each of us has our own stream of content.
It is Facebook’s long tail 😉
✔️ The 20 most-viewed posts received between 92.3 million views for first place and 45.4 million for twentieth place. Video is the winning format.
🥇 The most-viewed post is ‘This is how you raise your daughter’ (Video link: facebook.com/245631637573770) with 92.3 million views.
🥈 The second post, one for the voyeurs 😲, was viewed 71.1 million times: link https://www.facebook.com/647412609605452.
🥉 The third most-viewed post is my favourite: a video (shown below) of a whale 🐋 approaching a SUP (‘Giant whale approaches unsuspecting paddle boarder’).
This post was viewed 64.2 million times.
These numbers are very useful for giving us an idea of the maximum visibility we can achieve with one of our posts.
To rescale the overseas data to the Italian market, we can divide the volumes by the ratio between the US and Italian populations (330 million / 60 million = 5.5), so the equivalent visibility range might run from 16.8 million for the most-viewed post down to 11.8 million.
✔️ Analysing the most-viewed Facebook pages and posts, we can see that Americans enjoy entertainment and content such as recipes, pets and generally frivolous, even banal material. Let’s not kid ourselves: the same content is also the most popular in Italy.
This analysis brings out familiar considerations, first and foremost that Facebook is an environment where the quality of conversational content is generally low 🚽: lots of entertainment (often poor quality, like the woman throwing a glass at her partner or the two young people found together in the bathroom), and content for people who love sticking their noses into other people’s b…s.
The good news is that the feed is nevertheless very personal, so if we consume quality content we should avoid the stream of kittens, good-morning and good-night posts, and assorted bizarre games.
From a sociological perspective, another positive element is the presence among the most-shared links of gofundme.com, which enables people to donate to help others 👏.