More people see your Facebook posts than you think

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Let’s divide people into four categories:

*Heavy Facebookers

*Moderate Facebookers

*Occasional Facebookers

*People who don’t understand nor care about Facebook

I am a Facebook regular, but I’m definitely not a heavy user. I’m really more about LinkedIn than Facebook.

I’m always being told, “I’m sure you saw the Facebook pictures of my ________.” (children, cat, tattoo, etc.) However, there’s a fair chance I didn’t because I’m not on Facebook every day.

But I am amazed and jealous of my Facebook friends who post and immediately get three million likes.  I often feel some of my posts miss Facebook all together and go into outer space.

I’m always saying to my wife, did you see how many likes Peter/Paul/Mary got?  (Most of you are too young to remember Peter Paul and Mary—but I digress)

This is not good for my self-esteem and I should probably consider counseling.

However, recently Ina-Mae and I celebrated our 47^th Wedding Anniversary and I uploaded our wedding picture onto Facebook and I got 92 likes and 22 comments.  It suddenly dawned on me that more people are seeing my posts than I thought.

Then I had a terrifying thought—people are not liking my posts because they are boring.  I’m not sure this makes me feel any better.

I recently read an article, “The number Facebook doesn’t want you to see.”  The premise is that most of us significantly under estimate how many people view our posts because we don’t get many likes or comments.

“Facebook users drastically underestimate the size of their general audience by a factor of three, with “Facebook users reaching 35% of their friends with each post and 61% of their friends over the course of a month.”

Please keep in mind there are now about 1.2 billion people on Facebook.

In any event, I think we’ll agree it’s not a good idea to post anything on Facebook you’d like to keep secret.

David Sher is a co-founder of  Buzz12 Advertising. You can read more of his posts by looking for the “David Sher Posts” category in the sidebar of Buzz12’s website.