EdgeRank is the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine what articles should be displayed in your News Feed. The first thing you’ll see when you log into Facebook is your newsfeed. The newsfeed is a summary of what’s been happening recently among your friends on Facebook, usually full of “selfies” or people posting a picture of their latest meal!
Every action your friends take is a potential newsfeed story, called “Edges” by Facebook. That means whenever a of yours friend posts a status update, comments on another status update, tags a photo, RSVP’s to an event it, adds YET ANOTHER holiday photo whilst you’re sat at work, it generates an “Edge,” and a story about that Edge might show up in the user’s personal newsfeed.
It’d be completely overwhelming if the newsfeed showed all of the possible stories from your friends. So Facebook created an algorithm to predict how interesting each story will be to each user, (A while back, Facebook added an optional “ticker” by the side of the newsfeed, which shows EVERY action your friends make). Facebook calls this algorithm “EdgeRank” because it ranks the edges. Then they filter each user’s newsfeed to only show the top-ranked stories for that particular user.
This is good because it stops your newsfeed becoming too full of stuff that you’re not interested in, but on the other hand, people may not see anything you post, just because Zuckerberg and co don’t think they’ll like it.
Using Facebook as a brand to engage with new and potential customers or supporters can be hugely beneficial, but to get your posts noticed, you need to get people engaging with it, by ‘liking’ your posts, or more importantly, commenting on them! Comments have a higher weight than likes, so if you post something along the lines of “Fill in the blank: The feature you’d most like to see in our new iPad app is ________”, your post will be seen by a lot of people, both organically (people that ‘like’ your page) and virally (people who have friends that ‘like’ your page, but it still shows on their timeline). You’ll also get a lot more weight than if you posted “Like this photo for your chance to win a holiday for 2 people in Ibiza”.
Although it may seem spammy asking people to ‘like’ or comment on things you post, in the long run it’ll be worth it as their affinity with your page grows and they’ll start to see more and more of the content you post, ultimately increasing both your exposure and reach.
The third and final factor of EdgeRank that affects the overall ‘score’ of your content is time decay. Over time the score of things you post will lower as Facebook wants people to see the most recent content in their newsfeed, so no matter how popular your post may be, it won’t be there forever!
