Have you ever noticed how you have a couple hundred friends on Facebook, but your news feed typically only shows posts from the same few dozen? There’s a reason for this, and it’s called EdgeRank. Facebook’s EdgeRank is an algorithm that decides whether your post is good enough to be put on someone’s news feed. And most people are failing to make the grade.
Knowing is Half the Battle
It’s important to figure out how this algorithm affects you. The average shelf life for a post on Facebook is about 4 hours. After that, it’s lost to the timeline. Sure, you can boost it’s shelf life with some fundamental SEO for social media strategies, but within Facebook, there’s little that SEO can do.
So if you want to make sure you post makes it to the largest number of fans, you need to maximize your EdgeRank.
EdgeRank is much like gravity. It’s invisible, incredibly important, but no one really knows exactly how it works. However, the algorithm is known, and it’s pretty easy to understand. The ranking of the status comes down to User Affinity x Edge Weight x Time Decay. Each part of the algorithm is equally important.
The Three Keys
The EdgeRank for a post isn’t constant. Every time a user opens their news feed, the status updates they see are based on the post’s EdgeRank as of right that moment. This is where time decay comes into play. Otherwise, the same posts could keep clogging up news feeds ad nauseum.
Edge weight is where the mystery really comes into play. Facebook tries to display posts that are relevant to the user’s interests. So it “weighs” your update with what the fan likes, and tries to make a match. Facebook’s ability to predict user interests was actually a little too good, and prompted the changing of the EdgeRank algorithm to include the occasional random post as well. Also included in the Edge weight is how much activity the post is generating, especially with user affinity factored in.
User affinity is how much you have in common with your friends. If you and Joe have 88 friends in common, and you frequently post on each other’s walls, chances are good you’ll see most of Joes posts. Facebook thinks you clearly share similar interests, and you interact with a similar set of people. And that’s great, until you’re trying to get your post on someone’s news feed that you don’t share a lot of posts or friends with.
How to Solve It
Since the goal is to get your posts to more people, you need to make sure your posts and updates maximize every bit of the EdgeRank algorithm. Since it’s pretty hard to beat an algorithm, the only sure way to come out on top is to make sure you have quality content on a frequent basis. Of course, you should have seen that coming.
Quality content is the best solution to every social media problem. Be mindful of that when posting constant offers on an avalanche of political commentary on Facebook – the less people interact with your post, the smaller your reach is.
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