Most of the tools I talk about in this newsletter have to do with helping you tell great stories. But today, I want to talk about a tool to help you share your stories.
And just hold on to your anger for a second, because you’re going to get mad when I say the name of this awesome tool.
It’s Facebook.
HANG ON, HANG ON, I KNOW THAT SEEMED OBVIOUS, LEMME EXPLAIN MYSELF.
Since I started at BuzzFeed, I’ve become more and more of a convert to Facebook. It’s our no. 1 source of social traffic to the site.
But it’s also really hard to find data on how many people are actually seeing the stories I post on Facebook. If they’re not getting liked/shared, I don’t have any idea whether or not my friends are actually seeing my work.
A team of data scientists at Stanford and Facebook noticed this problem, too and this spring, they released some research that suggests that I’m not alone.
Nearly everyone, they found, underestimates how many people see the stories that get posted on Facebook. The researchers say that on Facebook, there’s a massive “invisible audience.” (You might call them “lurkers” or “creeps.” Or, I suppose, “friends who just don’t ‘like’ a lot of content on Facebook.”)
What they found was that if you post something to Facebook, about 35% of your friends see that thing. If you post a few things a month, roughly 60% of your friends will see at least one of those posts.
All the while, they found that most people assume their audience is, at best, a quarter of that size.
Writes the research team: “Approximately half of our participants wanted to reach larger audiences, but they already had much larger audiences than they estimated.” They just had no idea that Facebook was spreading their content so far.
So: Use your Facebook audience. Share with them. There are already more people reading your stories than you think.
You can read the full research paper here, or their visually-friendly SlideShare presentation here.