I recently used a R script from Keith McNulty to analyse my Facebook data. I was curious to know how much I had been posting for the past 10 years, but I also wanted to know much information Facebook had about me.
I was able to download over 4,000 days of data and more than 30,000 posts. These posts were mine, but also from friends that were posting on my timeline.
In the process, I learned these three points:
1. I have 1000’s of posts per year
I remember when I initially joined Facebook, my friends I would basically communicate and organise everything by posting publicly on our walls (no sense of privacy!). That easily explains why I have some many posts for the first few years of data. I can see a huge peak in 2012 and 2013, but I’m suspecting this was due a Spotify integration that was posting automatically the songs I was listening to.
In the past few years, I started interacting much less and made my privacy settings more restrictive. That’s the reason why we see a decline in posts from 2016.
2. Lunch and dinner time were the moments to post
Just as a caveat, in the past few years I’ve been living in Germany and in the UK, but have also spent most of my holiday time in my home country Bolivia. From the graph below, we can see many posts before 7am. Those were possibly posts created in Bolivia (4-5 hours behind UK time). Other than that, most of my posts were during my lunch break or later in the evening.
3. It is all about music
When I looked into the most common words from my posts, they were certainly all about Music. This might be again skewed due the Spotify integration, but I would certainly used to share a lot music with friends over Facebook. A genre that I love and that stands out in the word cloud below is Bossa Nova – “Gilberto”, “Ipanema”, “Joao” and “Garota” are all either singers or parts of song titles. As you might also notice, I really enjoyed listening to Jazz from Norah Jones and Diana Krall.
My mother tongue is Spanish and I can see that I spent a lot of time congratulating family members and friends for their birthdays. There are several words related to this as well.
There is no wonder why Facebook knows so much about us! There is a lot of information on us there.
Do you know how much you’re posting? Share with us in the comments below.
