Facebook EdgeRank: What Is It and Why Should You Care?
Chances are if you have a Facebook Business Page you spend many hours thinking about how to get more “Likes” or fans to your page. And, once those fans are there you want them to engage with your page, leave comments and come back often to learn about all your amazing products and services. The only problem with this is, the likelihood of someone visiting your page again after the original “like” is slim to none. So, how do you get all the wonderful content you are creating out to your “fans/likers?”
The answer: Most fans will consume your content via their Facebook News Feed. You know that screen you get to when you first sign into Facebook that tells you what others are posting… And, as a default all Facebook users news feeds are set to “Top News” which means that you don’t see every post by every friend or page that you like.
The trick with the News Feed is that the friends that you interact with the most show up more often than others. It’s important to have your News Feed optimized in order to make posts show up in your fans news feed. So, by optimizing your news feed to get the most interaction, engagement and weight you can it will help to ensure that you are getting your content out to the masses. This is where the term NFO or News Feed optimization came from and Facebook has a formula they use to determine the weight of your posts called EdgeRank.
Your EdgeRank determines which posts show up in the news feed. Each post is judged on 3 different criterion:
- Affinity: This is how often the person interacts with your content and vice versa. Each time you visit a fan page, click the “Like” button, comment on a user’s status or look at a picture, you increase the affinity score with that user. This makes it very important to have compelling content that people want to interact with. Suggestions would be: multimedia, blog automation, polling questions etc.
- Weight: This is a measurement of the weight of the interactions with your post. The more interactions the more weight and they type of interaction matters too. For instance someone can like your post or someone could comment on your post and a comment would get more weight.
- Recency: Essentially a time stamp. The older the post is the less important it becomes. So, posting regularly is recommended to help this score, however it’s important to note that if you keep posting one after the other in a sort of “rapid fire” method, you will bring the relevance down and hurt your chances of being seen.
Until recently it was more difficult to figure out where you stood as far as your EdgeRank score. Just the other day I was turned on to a new tool called EdgeRank Checker. Here you can sign in using your Facebook account and check the score for any pages that you admin.
You simply select your page, pick the date and hit “Get My Score” and Voilå! there you have it.