What's the significance of 250 Facebook posts per week? | Hacker News Reader

What's the significance of 250 Facebook posts per week?

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109 pointsmgalka12 comments

From buffer's faq. [1]

> example, Facebook recommend 5 posts per day as the limit, but 25 is really the upper limit that they allow without decreasing the reach of your posts.

So I can only assume that these people have found out that the actual hard limit for non penalised posts is 250.

1. https://faq.buffer.com/article/482-what-are-daily-posting-li...

If the accounts are posting at different times of the day, and the reports are all for the same 7 day period it doesn't make much sense that all the accounts would show exactly 250 posts. Given that they post at different times of the day.

I think this is an API limit on the analytics. From my cound of the Business Insider posts it looks like they're actually posting nearer 650 posts a week.

It's just being capped by the API to 250.

Are you sure the numbers are correct and it's not just capping at 250?

I just counted the number of posts on Business insider in the last 24 hours [1]. I got about 157 posts, which suggests significantly more than 250 per week.

[1] https://m.facebook.com/pg/businessinsider/posts/?ref=page_in...

Given the suspiciousness of the number, do you think FB is using a single byte for the counter?

it would be 255 if it was in a single byte

255 would be the limit of the counter.

But the limit set in code could be any value supported by the counter.

int8 TOTAL_POST_LIMIT = 250

Interesting. Might not be related, but once upon a time, Facebook had an API for pulling data on a feed that was limited to 250 posts (now documented as 100 posts) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27760273/how-to-get-avera...

Googling around, it looks like a lot of outlets appear to write 200-350 posts per week, and since they are aiming for a certain number, it could just be that these four tend to aim for 250 worth sharing each week? Hmm. Doesn't seem right either.

Basically... I've no idea. I'm curious too! :)

I think it's the API limit. Last time I tried doing something like this I hit the 250 posts limit.

One wild guess...

(7 * 24 * 60)/250 = 40.3 minutes per post.

"Zuckerberg said on the call that Facebook continues to engage its users, with the average U.S. consumer spending 40 minutes on the social network each day." [0]

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-23/facebook-...

... Are these places really posting every 40 minutes? I guess I don't know how Facebook filters things out to keep us sane, but I'd unfollow them in a heartbeat if I saw new posts that often.

Most likely, either the number of posts or the mechanism counting them is capped at 250. Probably the counting system. You'd expect to get slightly less than 250 once in a while, depending on when you counted, if this was measuring real post counts.

Everybody has about the same budget, and depending on the site, that's when the labor force is at work maybe? For something tech like Gizmodo, the posting pattern might correlate to a workday based on a certain region. Buzzfeed would have a staff that goes 24/7, maybe spread out globally or just with a labor pool with some people willing to work the Graveyard Shift from home. Some content probably has to be "timely" whereas other pieces can be on a production schedule so to speak. Just thinking out loud here.

Somebody in marketing has targeted 50 a (work)day, which is a nice, round number and that's what their staff are producing.

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