Your Invisible Facebook Friends

Tech insiders frequently reference the fact that most social networks are dominated by a small number of active content creators, while a larger number of users regularly use the platform but rarely or never post content.

Users of social networks, however, have yet to comprehend this dynamic. Facebook users dramatically underestimate how many people see the content that they share, according to a new study published by Facebook data scientists and Stanford University researchers.

Facebook users consistently guessed that the size of their audience was just 27 percent of its actual size, the study found based on the logs of 222,000 users’ posts over the course of a month.

There was no real way for the users to gauge their posts’ reach, since none of the the publicly visible signals of friend count, likes, and comments strongly correlated with the audience size for a single post.