With 800 million people on Facebook, the social network is a prime medium for marketers.
Therefore, this makes Edgerank one of the most important algorithms in marketing.
Edgerank is a secret algorithm that ranks the content you publish and determines which content will be visible to your fans.
Edgerank not only determines which of your connections are the most important to you and, hence, whose content appears most frequently; but also determines which kind of content appears higher than others in the Facebook newsfeed.
Understanding the rules of Edgerank and how this algorithm works is essential for anyone seeking to market a product or service on Facebook.
When marketing on Facebook, you want as many people as possible to see your posts, thus understanding Edgerank and what content ranks higher is pivotal.
In order to make your content highly visible, there are 3 elements of Facebook Edgerank that you need to understand: 1.
Affinity Affinity is all about relationships.
This two-part system begins by determining how relevant your page is to your followers.
Just liking a page adds some helps, but the majority of relevancy is determined by how much a fan reads your updates, visits your page, or writes about your topic.
The stronger the relationship to your page, the more likely it is that your content will rank higher in a certain user's newsfeed.
Beyond just your page being relevant, the second aspect of affinity is that the content you publish must also be relevant.
Only publish content that is relevant to your page.
For example, if your page is about email marketing and you post a status about dogs, that content isn't relevant and will, therefore, rank lower.
2.
Weight Facebook gives you the option to share all kinds of different content, from text updates to photo and video updates.
While sharing a variety of updates is encouraged, Facebook has it's own weight system for ranking the importance of different types of content.
Facebook ranks content in the following order (starting with what ranks the highest): Photos, Videos, Links, Status Updates, Questions, Apps.
Therefore, it is important to note that photos and videos are ranked at the highest and are seen by more people.
So, instead of simply posting a quote or status update, consider putting the text in an image for higher rank and views.
3.
Time Decay Time is of the essence on Facebook.
The older the content is, the less interest Facebook sees it to be.
Therefore, it's important to understand when most of your fans are online and publish content at that time, so as to get more likes and comments (which increases the shelf life of a post).
There has been great speculation surrounding the best times/days to post on Facebook, but many believe that posts done outside business hours have 20% higher engagement rates.