Facebook Admitted Miscalculating Likes, Reactions and Shares to Brands

For the third time this year-Facebook has admitted to miscalculating its reporting statics. In a blog post today, Facebook has admitted to miscalculating the number of likes and shares it shows for web links via its API, or application programming interface.

Two months ago, Facebook admitted it was only counting video views of more than three seconds when calculating its “Average Duration of Video Viewed” metric. By eliminating videos under three seconds, the average engagement was inflated. It also found multiple errors in its metric reporting including organic reach, video, Instant Articles and referrals.

Today the global social media company has found misrepresentation of the number of likes and reaction emojis marketers see for their Live videos, as well as discrepancy between the counts for the Like and Share Buttons via our Graph API.

During ReThinkTV Marketing Forum, TV’s biggest bosses in Australia- Paul Anderson (Ten), Hugh Marks (Nine), Peter Tonagh (Foxtel), and Tim Worner (Seven), Marks had his turn at attacking Facebook saying: “If you are an advertiser you want transparency and accurate transparency. Our measurement is laser like… it’s not a moment in time, it’s averages; all marketers should demand that level of scrutiny from all providers.”

Facebook blog post:

Live Video Metrics in Page Insights: Reallocating Streaming Reactions Counts on Posts

For Live videos, we introduced streaming reactions. Live video posts can have multiple reactions per person, since people can react at any moment of the live broadcast.

In Page Insights in the column for “Reactions on Post,” however, we show only one reaction per unique user. We misallocated the extra reactions per user that happened during the live broadcast to the “Reactions from Shares of Post” section, instead of counting them in the “Reactions on Post” section, so we’re making a change to correct it. Note that total counts were and are correct; some of them were just captured in the wrong reporting column when broken out.

The fix for this issue will apply to newly created Live videos, starting mid-December. It will increase “Reactions on Post” by 500 per cent on average and will decrease them on “Reactions from Shares of Post” by 25 per cent on average (actual impact to specific videos may vary).

Like, Share Buttons and Mobile Search Discrepancy

We have identified a discrepancy between the counts for the Like and Share Buttons via our Graph API and the counts when you enter a URL into the search bar in the Facebook mobile app (see screenshot below).

To clarify, our Like and Share button metrics pull:

The number of likes of a URL off Facebook
The number of shares of a URL off Facebook (this includes copy/pasting a link back to Facebook)
The number of likes and comments on stories on Facebook about a URL

We have found that there may be a difference between what these metrics count and what the mobile search query counts. We are looking into why inputting the URL as a search query in Facebook’s mobile app might have corresponding numbers that can be higher or lower in certain cases. We are working to resolve this issue so that the Like and Share button metrics and our mobile search query metrics match up, and we will notify partners as soon as we have an update.