The days of posting something on your Facebook Fan Page wall and having all of your fans see it are gone. As Facebook continues to grow and improve the way that users are served content, EdgeRank is something that all marketers and businesses should be aware of.
Playing a central role in the Facebook user experience, EdgeRank determines what items and stories are to be populated on an individual users News Feed. Specifically, each story is assigned a value which takes into account three known factors: Affinity, Weight, and Time
Affinity: the relationship between the user and the updates origin page and or/friend whose update it is.
Weight: influenced by what category the story falls under. Example: a photo that is uploaded to a Facebook fan page vs. a comment on a person’s status. As stated in the infographic below, activities that require higher levels of user engagement tend to get a higher score than those that don’t.
Time: how recent the update/action occurred.
Understanding the concept of EdgeRank is fundamental for a business when considering the following: As a result of EdgeRank, a business/brand that has a Facebook fan page is more likely to hit new users rather than hit the same users with Facebook updates over time. In other words, EdgeRank prevents the same user from seeing updates from a Facebook page if it deems it to be a poor relationship between the two, thus allowing the brand to find new users who may be more inclined to interact with them.
Check out this infographic below on more information on Facebook EdgeRank and how you can improve on EdgeRank:
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Do you use Facebook to promote your brand? If so, how do you stay ‘creative’ and ‘relevant’ for your fans? Let us know in the comments below.
