If you have a Facebook page you would have noticed lots of chatter about the how your updates aren’t reaching as many fans as they used to and how small business owners shouldn’t have to pay to have their updates displayed to their fans.
Well I’m here to tell you that this is all crap! Pardon the language, but it’s true. Yes, Facebook introduced Promoted Posts but that didn’t change anything which was already in place. The facts of the matter are is that only 3.5 percent to 16 percent of your fans will organically see your updates. Why? Facebook is just so busy with lots of people, lots of updates, lots of photos and of course lots of video. If you were to see each and every possible story in your news feed you would be completely overwhelmed. One Facebook engineer stated that you only see 1 out of every 500 potential stories in your news feed.
What does this mean to you as business owners who are using Facebook to promote their businesses? Just that you need to understand how Facebook works and use it to your advantage. Similar to Google’s search algorithm, Facebook have their own algorithm called Edgerank.
Understanding how Edgerank works and how to use it to your advantage is imperative to your success on Facebook. Edgerank is made up of three factors and everything you post on Facebook is ranked using this system. Here are the three factors and how you can get them working to your advantage.
Affinity = Relationship:
Affinity is your fans relationship with your page. Unfortunately you can’t stalk out your fans in the hope that they will see everything you post on your page. They must interact with your page. As soon as someone clicks that ‘like’ button you have to, as soon as possible, get them to interact with your page – I’ve been told that you have 72 hours – for them to build the relationship with you – however I haven’t tested this on my own page yet. How do you get them to interact? Firstly ask them to introduce themselves and secondly post interesting, engaging content which they want to like and comment on.
Weight = Interaction:
Every story you produce – think status update, sharing a photo or video – is given a weight from Facebook. The higher the weighting the higher your Edgerank score which means more of your updates will be shown in your fans news feeds. So what has more weight – videos, photos, links and then text. Whilst we can’t all produce videos regularly, we can all add photos to our updates fairly easily. Weight is also determined by the number of likes, comments and shares your stories gets, so make sure you are encouraging your fans to interact with you at all times.
Time Decay = Consistency:
Finally the last part of Edgerank is time decay. The easiest way to remember this one is that people want to read today’s news today, not yesterday’s news today. Your update has the average life of three hours so it’s important that you are posting consistency on Facebook. Consistency is the key. Aim for two to three posts per day spaced around, but do at least one per day to ensure that you remain top of mind for your fans.
Want to know how your Edgerank is going? Jump over to www.edgerankchecker.com and see. Don’t worry what your number is now – just aim for continuous improvement.
