July 26, 2012

Creating an “Edge” over your Competitors on Facebook

Competitive Edge Have you ever wondered why your Facebook posts don’t show up on the wall of all your fans? You post a photo or status update, and see at the bottom left corner of the post that only 200 people saw it. You know you have 500 fans, who in turn have on average 300+ friends. How did your post only reach 200 people? Well my friends, let me introduce you to a little tool called EdgeRank Checker. EdgeRank Checker, created by the geniuses at Facebook, uses an algorithm to rank posts in the Facebook News Feed. Business pages that have a high EdgeRank score have a better chance of showing up in your news feed than pages with low EdgeRank score. That’s right; Facebook controls and dictates who gets to see your posts, so it’s important to follow the three variables that control your overall score. The first variable is affinity, which is concerned with the relationship between User and Page, and is a measure of the interactions that exist between the two. Examples of interactions that Facebook considers are:

Likes
Comments
Clicks (on links, photos, etc.)
Shares
Wall Posts
Mentions

Basically anytime there is engagement between a business’s page and a fan of that page, affinity exists and is measured. The next variable is weight, which places values on the specific type of interactions that exist on a Page. Facebook controls which actions receive a higher value over another, but as a general rule, the actions that take the most time receive more “weight”. For instance, shares have more weight than comments, but comments have more weight than likes. The type of post is also weighed, with videos receiving the highest weight, followed by photos, status updates with links, a regular status update, and finally a post with only a link. When a post contains a combination of these (i.e. a video with description and link to a website) it receives a combined value of all the weights. The last variable is Time Decay, which scores the age of each post. The older the post, the less valuable it is. Facebook wants the News Feed to be fresh and interesting for its users, so it casts aside “old news”. Putting time and effort into all of your posts, and finding out that it won’t even be seen by all of your fans, can be pretty irritating. But knowing how your posts are graded, and how you can increase your exposure rate by following the algorithm created by Facebook, it can give you an edge over your competitors. Be smart, think out your posts, and give us a call if it becomes overwhelming.