Bad news, status update wordsmiths and chronic oversharers: turns out the average Facebook post is only seen by 16% of your friend list. A few factors contribute to this number, including the simple fact that it’s unlikely for all of your friends to be online at the same time and the newsfeed is constantly updating. More interesting, though, is the complex and mysterious algorithm Facebook uses to rank updates by relevance and importance. That post about the salad you had for lunch, for example, might not make it onto most of your friends’ newsfeeds. Says Facebook’s Director of Product Marketing Brian Boland: “There are pieces of content you create that are interesting, and there’s some that are not.” Here’s what I know for sure: 16 percent of my friends are in for some brilliant material about the grilled chicken wrap I just ate. [TechCrunch]
