May 12, 2011 by Mary Killelea 

Ever wonder how your posts get seen by others? EDGE RANK is Facebook’s formula for ranking — This is CRITICAL to understand for your Facebook Business Marketing Success

Facebook launched back in 2004 which seems like a life time ago and it is in the internet world. In a recent article I was reading from Tech Crunch Edge Rank the secret sauce that makes facebook’s News Feeds Tick  they said Zuckerberg put the compents of FB’s Like buttons, instant chat and auto login capabilities into context: Zuckerberg says “we are building a Web where the default is social.”

Here’s a little explaination about each of these features that makes FB so social.

Social plugins enable you to provide engaging social experiences to your users with just a line of HTML. Because the plugins are served by Facebook, the content is personalized to the viewer whether or not they have signed into your site

The Graph API is the core of Facebook Platform, enabling you to read and write data to Facebook. It provides a simple and consistent view of the social graph, uniformly representing objects (e.g., people, photos, events, and pages) and the connections between them (e.g., friendships, likes, and photo tags)

Facebook authentication enables your application to interact with the Graph API on behalf of Facebook users, and it provides a powerful single-sign on mechanism across web, mobile, and desktop apps.

Insights enable you to access key metrics and statistics about your Page, Application or domain.

Collectively these interactions make up everyone’s EdgeRank

News Feed only displays a subset of the stories generated by your friends — if it displayed everything, it would be overwhelming. SO this is where Facebook Business Marketing comes into play. Yes there is or should be a strategy to your posts.  Successful Facebook Business Marketers are always trying to make sure their posts (objects) are engaging and interactive so they can get good EDGE RANK.

The Edge Rank is pretty simple to understand in theory. Every item ( text post, photo, video or link ) that shows up in your News Feed is considered an Object. If you have an Object in the News Feed which in simple terms is a status update, whenever another user interacts with that Object they’re creating what Facebook calls an Edge, which includes actions like tags and comments.

Each Edge has three components important to Facebook’s algorithm:

• First, there’s an affinity score between the viewing user and the item’s creator — if you send your friend a lot of Facebook messages and check their profile often, then you’ll have a higher affinity score for that user than you would, say, an old acquaintance you haven’t spoken to in years.
• Second, there’s a weight given to each type of Edge. A comment probably has more importance than a Like, for example.
• When the post was written is a factor as well. The older an Edge is, the less important it becomes.

Multiply these factors for each Edge then add the Edge scores up and you have an Object’s EdgeRank. And the higher that is, the more likely your Object is to appear in the user’s feed. It’s worth pointing out that the act of creating an Object is also considered an Edge, which is what allows Objects to show up in your friends’ feeds before anyone has interacted with them.

It has been talked about that the two tabbed viewing of your Top News and Most Recent is a little confussing for most users.  Many people still use both tabs, with over 50% of users clicking over to the ‘most recent’ tab on a regular basis.

It has been said also that posts that come in from third party automated systems don’t weigh as much but if that is the only way you can manage to post then I would recommend you continue for now.

This is such an imporant post because this is the basis for your success on facebook as a marketing vehicle. This is why posts need to be engaging, and you need to have a strategy around how and when your business is interacting on facebook. Done right you can have a successful Edge Rank.  Unfortuantely most business owners don’t realize this.

Here are our recommended steps for facebook business marketing:

1. create a welcome tab for your fan page that offers an incentive and true value to people to become a fan of yours on FB. It’s your first impression make it a good one. Here are some examples of custom fan page designs.

2. create a customizable profile banner for your fan page

3. optimize your fan page there is a lot of areas on your fan page that are key areas of real estate and you should not waste that marketing opportunity.

4. develop a marketing strategy that includes identifing your facebook team contributors and strategist, unified  messaging &  purpose and determine a consistent engagement protocal while being flexible and responsive to your fans.

If you want to learn more or have Working Web Solutions work with you on any of these goals.
Please contact us at 503-997-6935 we’d love to share what we’ve learned and been able to do for other clients.  Facebook Business Marketing can be really rewarding.