After my last post, on leaving FB, I started posting my new social-media addresses in my FB feed. The idea was to offer folks a way to join me on these other platforms.
I noticed some of friends posting their own new social-media accounts. I’d acknowledge them with something like “See you there!”
The response inevitably was “What’s your account?”
But I’d already posted my account information a couple of times. Why didn’t they already know?
I thought of a couple of reasons:
- Despite my inflated sense of self-importance, my moving to another platform simply wasn’t significant enough for other people to remember. That’s fine.
- FB was suppressing was “Here are my new accounts” posts.
I decided to test the latter. I posted the following on FB. Note that the earlier one is on the bottom.
Note the difference: The earlier, lower post has the direct names of the social-media sites. The later, upper post has coded names for the new sites.
I didn’t ask for folks to decode the names, nor request they follow me, nor anything else save to “Like” each post.
What I thought would happen is that the FB would suppress the post with the direct site names, and allow the post with the coded names.
As you can see, more people “Liked” the earlier post than the later one.
What happened?
The short answer is that I don’t know.
The speculative answer is that when folks saw two posts that were nearly identical, they thought it was an error on my part rather than compare the two posts. They just hit “Like” on the first one.
Or perhaps FB’s algorithm determined that the posts were almost identical, and suppressed the later one.
Six of the people who “Liked” the second (upper, later) post also “Liked” the first post; that leaves four people who “Liked” the second post but not the first one. Everyone else just “Liked” the first post.
What does this prove?
Nothing. This wasn’t a scientific study. I didn’t allow for user confusion due to similar phrasing, nor for other confusion that might be caused by folks using their phones vs. web browsers, nor for those who can’t force chronological order when viewing their FB feeds (hint: FB Purity).
I may try this again over the next couple of weeks, posting only one of these per weekend. I’ll see if I get the same results.