If you’re a company with a Facebook page and actively engaging in the community on Facebook, then you may be aware of recent changes to Facebook’s algorithm of how they calculate EdgeRank. Now you may ask yourself, “What is EdgeRank”?
Put simply EdgeRank is scoring of content and activity that occurs within the walled-garden of Facebook So, the status update, the photo shared, the “Liked” status, or comment left on someone else’s status or photo is all calculated within EdgeRank. Here’s some more information on EdgeRank if you’re interested.
You know how Facebook keeps changing your default sort away from “Most Recent” and back to “Top Stories”. How do they know what should be displayed in “Top Stories” for you? It’s EdgeRank.
Recent changes in how Facebook calculates EdgeRank has caused some turmoil with Facebook Page admins because now your page update may not be seen by all your fans as easily as it once was previously. I’m sure you’ve seen status updates like the one below encouraging you to change (or more accurately extend) how you’re currently connected to a businesses’ page.
Are the suggestions above the “fix” you’ve been looking for? Kind of, but not how you’d expect. The key to the actions being suggested in the status update requests shown above is that they’re encouraging the existing audience of fans to engage more with their page. At this point perhaps the only thing your audience has done was to “Like” your page. Let’s be honest, that really didn’t take much effort and really didn’t mean a lot did it? A single mouse click and they were done. Nothing says commitment like a mouse-click!
Let’s look at the first status update as an example. From what I’ve seen, whenever you like a page the default setting is that that page’s updates are going to “Show in News Feed” unless you turn it off. So that’s almost a moot point. The second status goes a little further and suggests that the audience add their page to an “Interest List”. There’s no secret setting in adding it to an interest list, they’re just increasing their level of engagement with your page. Increasing that level of engagement is what’s impacting EdgeRank and EdgeRank is the score factor that determines what updates are more than likely going to be seen by your audience.
What’s interesting is that “Christer” in the first status and the 3 people that liked that post in the 2nd status potentially had more successful interactions with the page than the other the suggestions. As a page admin, you’re goal is to get people to more actively engage with your page. You want them to like your updates. You want them to leave comments on your updates. You want them to share and repost your updates and photos that you’re sharing. All of those activities are what increases your EdgeRank in the right ways.
So, instead of trying to figure out a way to “trick” the system into working the way you want. Invest some time into really thinking about the content you’re sharing as a page on Facebook. It should be what your audience wants to see. What they like. What they’re interested in. If you produce good and engaging content on a regular basis then your fans/audience will engage and thus be more likely to continue seeing your updates now and into the future.
Now, if you’ll excuse me. I need to go find a picture of a cute cat eating some bacon so I can post it to my wall.
