Well Mark Zuckerman and the guys at Facebook are certainly making us dance to the Edgerank Algorithm. I must say they really know how to spoil a gal’s day. All our hard work with strategising our Social Media and he has only gone and developed a brand new Algorithm! Legend has it that it’s stored under lock and key at his desk. The incredibly exasperating thing about this little piece of code (Edgerank) is that it’s been designed to stop 84% of your fans from seeing your content. (Yes you did read that correctly). And why is he only allowing 16% of your fans to see your updates? Why to keep those nice shareholders (cough, splutter) happy. He wants us to buy more advertising space for our business social media efforts, so that they can justify the hefty share price paid when Facebook floated a couple of months ago. Facebook are trying to create a 20% share newsfeed and 80% paid for news feed. And the name of this dastardly deed? Edgerank (you’d think they’d call it “Apocalypse” or “Terminator”). To be fair to the man, we have had access to Facebook for free up until now – but – it is hard for the small business community to take. After all the hard work we have put in to our marketing and social media management, posting interesting content to our fans and ensuring that we give them what they want.
So what does this mean for the small business community? It means that Facebook is deciding what content they feel is important to you, not what you asked for. This is a bit like ordering the vegetarian lentil loaf and getting a piece of blue meat that moos at you slapped up on your plate instead, it’s not what the customer ordered. As we are all about customer care and satisfaction we need to start addressing this issue.
The first thing to note when putting together your metrics, is that everything you do on Facebook, post a status update, photo etc is known as an “edge“, hence the name. The algorithm sorts all the edges by affinity, edge weight and recency. Affinity happens when you pop over and post on someone’s page, it’s about clustering on your little community and how often you post. However this is one way so should you decide to visit a fan you won’t automatically appear in their feed. If you post content that they will reply back to however, it will ensure that you appear in their feed and thereby it will help your social media strategy.
Videos, photos and links are the measurement tools of Edgeranks Edge Weight. The important thing to note here is that you should try
posting things with the heaviest edge weight. However, you need to bear your clients interest in mind, ie not everyone likes photos and so may not click on them. Alternate the postings by weight and interest. Likes and comments will affect the weight of the Edge so you need to post something that will cause a scandal darlings, or at the very least a frank discussion, as these will more likely appear in news feeds and go viral.
Recency relates to newer posts being of more interest to Facebook than older posts (unlike Twitter which uses a chronological ordering system). Post interesting and entertaining content that will create an Affinity with your fans, post photos and videos when possible, do it frequently. What else can we do to ensure our fans get to see the content and interact with us? Post this message which is currently doing the social media rounds: “To keep receiving all posts from us you have to hover the mouse on the “Like” button near our name. In the drop-down menu select ”ADD TO INTEREST LISTS”. Then create an interest list (and make a name for your favorite sites). When you select that interest list you will again get all of our posts and not the few 16% of them. We recommend that you follow the above instructions for ANY Facebook page you care about, so you can continue seeing all the posts from the pages you already like.” You might give us some feedback on that last point and let us know if engagement increases.
