A Video Guide to Facebook EdgeRank

Today, I’m going to be talking about EdgeRank. EdgeRank is an algorithm that Facebook uses to determine what’s going to be in your newsfeed. This has become even more prominent recently with the new hybrid newsfeed where we’ve seen most recent news and top news merged into one newsfeed.

So every time someone does something on Facebook, whether you post an update, post a video or share a link, this is called creating an edge.

Facebook then has a set of criteria they use to score this edge which will determine your EdgeRank. The higher your EdgeRank, the more likely you are to appear in someone else’s newsfeed.

So the factors that make up EdgeRank include affinity. This means the closeness you have for the other person. So if they’re listed as a colleague or a family member, there’s a clear affinity there. If you comment on a lot of their activity, if you write on their wall often, or even if you send them messages or just view their profile, Facebook can see you’ve got an affinity with that person.

Weight is the next aspect. So this is about making your updates a bit more interesting. So by adding a video to them or a link, you add more weight than if you were to just post a normal plain text update.

Time decay is also a factor. So this is about the recency of your update. Obviously, the more recent the update, the more relevant it seems.

So now I’m going to look at some of the things you can do with a business to market your Facebook activity to EdgeRank and hopefully appear in your users’ newsfeeds as a result. So, to market for affinity, this is all about getting engagement. A really good way to do this is to ask lots of questions. So, in your status updates, ask a question. This will get fans commenting and liking your update. You should encourage wall posts. So you might do this by having a competition, where they need to post on your wall to participate, or even just asking them what they’ve been up to and telling them to post on your wall.

When you’re getting this kind of interaction, it’s important to interact back with it. So if someone has posted on your wall, maybe like that post or comment on the post. This again just builds up the affinity.

Content is a really key thing. By just putting engaging, informative information up there on Facebook, you’re naturally going to build interaction. You’re naturally going to get likes and comments.

So to market for weight, for this, you might want to try posting videos or links and things that make your update a bit richer. You could add a location to your update, and this we might see move into its own area of EdgeRank. But at the moment, it just helps to add some depth to the update. Polls, this is a really good way of adding weight to your update, because not only does it add weight, but it also encourages interaction, which is going to increase your affinity at the same time.

Time decay is the last factor. So this is about getting the frequency of your posts right. I mean, you can get software that will tell you when you get most interaction with your posts, but mostly it’s just about experimenting and seeing what works for you and your brand. This one’s really key with the new newsfeed because the frequency of posts that appear in users’ newsfeed seems to have gone down. So the more fresh content you create, the more likely you are to appear in their newsfeed. It’s also important not to spam users, because, in the end, your updates will just be collapsed.

So those are just some of the things you can do to market your Facebook activity for EdgeRank, If you want to learn more, you can visit us at Koozai.com or follow us on any of the profiles below.