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Standford University Facebook

Facebook user's posts viewed by three times as many as they believe suggests study

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By Stephen Lepitak, -

July 13, 2013 | 2 min read

Facebook posts are viewed by three times as many people as users believe, according to research carried out by Stanford University.

The report entitled Quantifying the Invisible Audience in Social Networks’ has claimed to find that social media users ‘consistently underestimate’ their audience and found that their audience size estimate was only 27 per cent that of its true size.

In order to compile the report, the posts of 222,000 Facebook users was analysed, as well as their number of friends, likes and comments, which on average reached nearly two thirds (61 per cent) of their friends each month.

“The survey results suggest that people do a poor job of estimating the size of the invisible audience in social networks,” the report stated as it covered the uncertainly that people have around the size of the audience.

The report concluded that while advertisers are given access to analytics to measure the success of their campaigns, “users do not receive enough feedback to be aware of their audience size,” but that each post reaches over a third of their friends (35 per cent).

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