My Mom Might Be More Popular Than Me On Facebook
I logged onto Facebook last week to see something that absolutely horrified me.
That’s my mom. And to give this status context, my parents moved to Guam a couple years ago (a tropical island in the Western Pacific, roughly halfway between Japan and Australia) and were being hit by Typhoon Mangkhut when my mom posted this. While you might think the horrifying part about this post is that my parents were experiencing their first tropical storm since moving halfway across the world and were hanging on for dear life, you’d be wrong. The horrifying part about this post is that it got my mom 47 likes, a number that I’ve never even flirted with on Facebook before.
To be clear, I barely use Facebook and pay very little attention to it. But that doesn’t make this any less concerning. I grew up with Facebook. I’ve been on it almost since the beginning. I was in high-school during the free-love era of the platform when everybody was friending everybody while my mom didn’t join Facebook until 2011, meaning I had a roughly five year head start to establish my dominance and completely wasted it.
To understand how and why this happened, I’ve identified and attempted to analyze a few key statistics. Am I a loser? Is my mom a future influencer? Does any of this even matter? Let’s find out.
Friend Count
Me: 361
My Mom: 468
I know friend count doesn’t necessarily equate to popularity on Facebook. There are people who will send a friend request to someone they drove by on the street once. But still, my mom has more friends than me on Facebook. That stings to type.
Something important to mention here not for the purposes of this discussion, but for the purposes of my ego is that the average Facebook user has just 338 friends, so I’m actually above average.
This is also self-inflicted to a degree. In high school I had a friend who went out of his way to make sure his friend count stayed below a certain number. I don’t know why he did it, but I thought it was cool and so tried to do the same thing. I would never go above 200 Facebook friends. I would only be friends online with people I was actually friends with in real life or interacted with on a semi-regular basis. Which, as I type it, definitely sounds like something a not cool person with no friends would do to convince themselves that they are indeed cool and indeed do have friends. Which, to be fair, I didn’t.
No, I did not have many friends in high school. I don’t say this to be all “woe-is-me, waaaahh.” I was actually, honestly, truly very content being invisible. I moved from a school of 200 to a school of 2000 my sophomore year, so not only was I completely overwhelmed by the size of the school when I arrived, but friend groups had already been established, some dating all the way back to elementary school. If you think I was going to be able to infiltrate that, then you’ve never been to high school.
On the flip side, all the losers and nerds had already been established, too. So all I had to do was avoid wearing cosplay to school or expressing any sort of interest in LARPing and I would be fine. So I stocked my wardrobe with American Eagle, got myself the generic I’m-a-white-male-in-high-school hair cut, and executed my plan of being invisible to perfection. Also helping me be invisible was the fact that I was hardly ever at school (I had over 120 skips my junior year alone).
My point being that because I was invisible, I missed the aforementioned free-love wave of Facebook where everybody was friending everybody. By the time I got to college and actually had friends everybody had moved on to some mix of Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter.
As for my mom? She’s a former minister, so most of her friends are members of her previous congregations or are fellow ministers who she went to seminary with. I’d probably have 468 friends too if I preached to hundreds of people and was going to potlucks every week. Plus these people are religious, so you know they’re too nice to decline a friend request.
Average Likes/Post
Me: 15.3
My Mom: 46.9
To calculate this, I took the average number of likes from each of our past 10 posts. As you can see, my mom doesn’t just have more friends than me, but her friends like her posts more than my friends like mine. While it makes sense she would have more likes than me since she has more friends, she’s clocking in at a 10% like-rate, meaning on average, 10% of her friends are smashing the like button on her posts. I’m at a dismal 4.2%.
There are a few possible explanations for this. For one, my mom’s friends are significantly older than mine on average, and older generations are much more likely to like their friend’s posts. Primarily because they’re actually logging into Facebook to see those posts.
From 2008 to 2018, the average age of Facebook users has gone up from 33 to 40.5, meaning younger generations (my friends) have started to move on from the platform. Simply put, my friends aren’t liking my posts because they aren’t seeing them. That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.
Another reason for the Like Gap between my mom and I is that, as I mentioned before, my parents live in Guam. If you aren’t familiar, Guam is a tiny tropical island in the Western Pacific, and it’s beautiful. I’m honestly not sure how I’m supposed to even compete with that. My mom could post a photo of her at their local KFC (yes, there is one) with the caption “kfc in guam haha lewlz” and it would get at least 50 likes just because it’s coming from a tropical island. I take a photo of myself at a KFC here and I lose what few friends I have.
When my mom starts posting beach pics like this one? It’s over. No matter how many filters I use, I can’t make Kansas City look anywhere near as exotic as Guam.
Top Performing Post
Me:
Yes. 34 likes. Your eyes are not deceiving you. The number 3 followed by the number 4. My best post of all time only managed to accumulate 34 likes in total. I’m pretty sure there have been posts in Facebook history that got more than 34 likes by accident. Of the 1.13 trillion likes on Facebook to-date, my top post of all time managed to acquire 3.0088496e-11% of those. I’m not sure if putting it in those terms make it seem more or less impressive.
To give this more context, this post had a like-rate of 9.4%, meaning 9.4% of my friends hit the thumbs up button on it. As a reminder, my mom’s average like-rate is 10%. My best post didn’t even reach my mom’s average like-rate.
And this post features Sir Martin Sorrell in the background! The (at the time) CEO of WPP, a nearly $16 BILLION advertising company! In a tracksuit that screams “idgaf!” I thought he alone could drag me to 50 likes, but I was clearly mistaken. I know he’s not as recognizable as someone like *Will Smith, but come on.
*I do not know why I chose Will Smith for this example.
It probably doesn’t help that I look like the guy who wasn’t invited to the house party but somehow found out about it anyway and shows up and hovers around other people’s conversations hoping someone will acknowledge him so he can feel involved and they never do but that’s fine because he’s just happy to be there. I’m also sporting that cocktail straw a little too proudly. Maybe 34 for this one was generous.
Mom:
As you may have guessed from the caption, this photo was taken by my mom the first day after they moved to Guam. They didn’t have a house right when the got there so this was actually taken from a hotel room, which definitely helps the pic since it gave her a 10 story view of the ocean.
But if we’re being honest, this is an objectively bad photo (as far as photos of the ocean go, anyway). It’s cloudy, rainy, gloomy, and overall kind of depressing. The ocean looks grey and menacing. There’s no sunlight, let alone sunset to work with. If I were to create a word cloud for this photo, the largest words would probably be “shipwrecked” and “drowning.”
What we’re seeing here is the Guam effect. This photo all but confirms my theory that any photo taken in Guam (or any far away place for that matter) will always be better than anything I could ever capture here in the midwest. This was also right when my parents arrived at the island, so I’m sure a lot of people threw it a like just because they were happy to see they made it safe and sound. Whatever the reason, this post had a like-rate of 16.4%, which is nearly four times my average and almost double my top performing post.
Conclusion
My mom is more popular than me on Facebook, and I have to delete my account now.
