Facebook’s EdgeRank; it’s either silently killing your social media marketing efforts or making your life very easy. Much like Google, Yahoo and Bing rate websites and rank them based on their overall score (Google uses PageRank), so too does Facebook, ranking all of your Friends and Businesses based on a variety of aspects that contribute to the EdgeRank. In online brand marketing, understanding how EdgeRank works and how to beat it is crucial to getting your brand message seen and heard on the most influential social media outlet in existence.
What is EdgeRank?
EdgeRank is the probability that your status update, post, photo, link or video will show up in a Fan’s ‘News Feed.’ A few months back, Facebook renovated its entire platform, literally taking EdgeRank to the next level.
Before the Facebook upgrade, posts that you say in your News Feed were categorized by either ‘Top News’ or ‘Recent News.’ After the upgrade, you can still change the News Feed view to ‘Highlighted Stories First’ or ‘Recent Stories First.’ This is basically the same idea, with one very important twist, you now have the ability to ‘highlight’ stories and essentially give that business or friend priority over others.
Facebook’s EdgeRank is based on three factors, according to SocialMediaExaminer.com. These three factors are:
• Affinity or relationship between the creator and user
• Interaction with the story such as comments, likes and shares
• Timeliness
Facebook’s EdgeRank is personalized and custom to each and every 700-plus million Facebook users. Even if you and another Facebook friend have Liked all of the same businesses, and have all of the same friends, your News Feed will look very different based on those three EdgeRanking factors.
Affinity
When your Facebook history shows that you have an affinity to a certain friend or business, which increases that friend or businesses EdgeRank, making it more likely that they will show up on your News Feed over others. For example, you are trying to get pregnant and follow your local OB GYN on Facebook. You ask a lot of questions, comment on a lot of status updates, and share a lot of their articles. This increases affinity numbers and increases that chances that your physician’s Facebook Page will consistently show high in your News Feed.
The opposite would be if you followed your physician, read their status updates, but never liked, shared or commented on their posts. Even if you read every single one of their updates, but never interacted with them, Facebook would have no way of knowing that you have an affinity for this page and thus the page would not regularly show up in your News Feed. In fact, it might not show up at all.
Interaction
Facebook looks at every single thing that gets published as a ‘story,’ whether it’s a photo, video, link or comment. Each story creates other stories, or interactions, based off of the original story, or post. And each interaction weighs differently based on the level of that interaction. For example, leaving a comment on a post holds more weight than simply liking that post. The more weight you give to a business or friend, the more likely that entity will have a higher EdgeRank in your News Feed.
Timeliness
As a marketing, if your story is timely and deals with relevant information, its EdgeRank numbers will increase. Facebook is all about being on the cutting edge, so it would not make sense to rank stories that are irrelevant and untimely. All this would do is tarnish Facebook’s brand message. It would be similar to Google ranking an irrelevant news story from last year on its search results. This would go against everything in Google’s branding.
In order to be out in front of your audience, you need to increase your business page’s EdgeRank on Facebook. We can show you how…