What is Facebook EdgeRank and Why Should I Care?

By Ninja Jessica

If you have an established Facebook page for your company or brand, your EdgeRank is important to keep in mind as it could be affecting your marketing strategy.

Like the search engines, Facebook uses algorithms to determine what shows up in newsfeeds. So whenever someone comments on a status or a photo is uploaded to your newsfeed, it creates these edges.

EdgeRank is broken up into three factors within the algorithm: affinity, edge weight, and time decay.

Affinity

This is the interaction between you and your followers. Those who post on your page or comment on something you posted will help raise your score. Remember to reply to your fans either agreeing with them or just saying “thanks.” It is also important to remember that Facebook wants you to post comments and replies directly from their site. This means using any third party applications, such as TweetDeck, Hootsuite, etc., will actually lower your EdgeRank. The reason for this is because of the popular gaming applications like Farmville and Mafia Wars. So by lowering the affinity score on all third-party applications, this prevents them from having a higher EdgeRank.

If you are wondering how you can increase your affinity score, try posting status updates like this, “If you love Friday, like this post!” or “Tell us what your favorite season is.” By giving your fans a call to action, it will drive more engagement. Even hosting a contest or taking out Facebook ads will also boost your score. Be sure to build relationships with your fans and interact with them. The more you practice this, the better. And yes, you got it, a higher score!

Edge Weight

This is based on content. Posts that have photos will get a higher score than compared to a simple update. Also, leaving a comment on a post carries more weight than “Liking” it because of engagement. It takes more effort to comment than simply clicking on the “Like” button.

Always remember when posting any photo, link or video, that it needs some kind of explanation added. Those that don’t have any added words get the worst engagement. In fact, posts that having more than 141 characters (which is more than what you can post on Twitter) end up receiving the most engagement. So don’t be afraid of longer updates.

Time Decay

This is how recent an item is. The older the news, the further it drops in your newsfeed. Posting regularly will help, but it’s also important to know how frequently to post. Not posting enough can lead to missed opportunities and posting too much can seem “spammy.” Experiment with your frequency and time of day to find out what’s working for your page. Use your Facebook Insights to measure your success. Once you have a better idea of the best times to engage with your fans and how often, try coming up with a schedule that you can stick with.

As more and more brands are using social media as part of their marketing campaign, it’s important to keep up with platforms like Facebook as it is constantly growing. The main thing to keep in mind is that a successful Facebook page is one that has unique, rich and engaging content that’ll have fans coming back for more.