Lesson 3: EdgeRank and What it Means to You

EdgeRank is the unofficial term used to describe the algorithm Facebook uses to decide which of your author page posts to deliver to which fans. A common misconception is that if you get 500 fans all 500 receive every post you make. However, a few minutes of thought will tell you this can't be the case. Even with a filtered feed, the average Facebook user receives 1500 or more messages a day. Some with sizable friend lists, engage in groups or subscribe to many pages the number can go as high at 10,000 messages a day – AFTER FILTERING!!!

If Facebook delivered every message as it was received, you would scroll through hundreds of things you weren't interested in to find one that you are. So, Facebook developed an algorithm that attempts to determine your interests based on your engagement. If you click, comment, share or react to a certain type of post often, Facebook figures you would like more of those. If you frequently engage with a certain person or page, you will get more of those posts and they will be higher in your feed than those by people and pages you do not engage with.

This is why we began with the issue of content. By default, Facebook assumes that ads are not interesting to most of it's members. In fact, Facebook has a policy instituted in January 2015 to reduce significantly the number of "organic" (meaning unpaid) posts that meet the following criteria.

Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app

Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context

Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads

See why it is important that even your promotional posts contain value-added content? It's not that promotional ads won't be delivered. They just won't be delivered as widely as something with more non-promotional content.

The fact that many, if not most, social media marketers don't understand this and continue to churn out nothing but ads with little or no value-added content, explains why the average post only goes out to about 5-6% of those signed up for the page.

Now, there are ways to increase that reach. I routinely get coverage that is actually larger than my subscriber base. We will talk about that later this week. However, I would like to put some of this into perspective. It may seem like a big letdown that only one in twenty people liking your page get your posts, but there are reasons that EdgeRank is a good thing for marketers.

Why EdgeRank is a Good Thing

When marketing types hear that all of their beautiful promotions are not going to be delivered to all 500 or 5000 of their followers on Facebook they get depressed or angry or both. And it is a shock at first to realize that unless you work at it, the average post will only reach about one in ten of those hard earned "likes." Of course, you can, horrors of horrors, pay to boost your post to all of them, often for less than the price of a cup of coffee from a machine at work, but - Hey, it's the Internet. We ain't a-gonna pay for nothin' on the internet, even though it is our primary link between us and our fans. But that's a different topic.

I'm going to say something you will rarely hear: IT'S A GOOD THING THAT NOT ALL OF YOUR POSTS REACH ALL OF YOUR FANS.

That's right! EdgeRank is good for marketing. Let's look at several reasons why this is true.

EDGERANK TARGETS YOUR BEST CUSTOMERS

EdgeRank doesn't randomly choose who gets your posts. People who like, comment on, share or click on your posts will get more posts delivered to their Newsfeeds. Those who less frequently engage get fewer. Since those who most often engage with your posts are likely those most interested in your work, you are reaching your best customers most often.

EDGERANK INTRODUCES YOU TO LESS ENTHUSIASTIC CUSTOMERS WITHOUT OVERWHELMING THEM WITH CONTENT.

Ultimately, to get any type of reach, unless you are a major corporation with millions to spend on advertising driving people to your Facebook page, you have to put out a lot of content. Your fans will love this if you keep it interesting, focused on their interests, and mostly non-promotional. However, those who "liked" your page because you were running a contest, because they read one of your books and was sort of interested in you and your writing, or "liked" your page because you "liked" theirs may not be as interested in seeing as much content from you as your diehard fans. So, they get your message less often, but you still maintain a presence with them. If they start to see content they like and they begin to engage that will increase the amount of content they receive.

EDGERANK (AND OTHER FACEBOOK PAGE PRACTICES) FORCES YOU TO FOCUS ON CONTENT OVER PROMOTION

Too many people think about a Facebook author page as being nothing but an advertising medium and each post needs to be selling something. However, the best practices of social media marketing emphasize content over promotion. This means engaging with readers and providing them with value added materials.

What do I mean by "value added"? Well, let me explain. Today, I posted a promotion to a variety of Facebook Reader Groups. I posted a "meme" that had a hint about how to position elements on an ebook cover. I simply put in the status update: "A tip for Indie Publishers from DO-IT-YOURSELF EBOOK COVERS" and I added the URL and the price. That's value added. I got seven likes and three shares from groups that are huge and get hundreds, if not thousands, of posts a day. Also, I got a reach on my own FB page today on that post of 200% of our following.

Since I write science fiction, books about writing, and Bible studies, I post a lot of inspirational quotes, links to science and science fiction stories found online, short Bible studies and devotionals and historical articles. I also will add the occasional publishing news and humorous meme.

The proportion of promotional (buy my book, come to my book signing) to non-promotional (here's something interesting unrelated to my writing) is about one promotional post to ten non-promotional ones. Most social media suggest no more than one in five posts be of the "buy my product" variety. One of my favorite examples of content marketing is the Kraft Food page. There are hardly any posts advertising Kraft products directly. Most all of them are recipes which of course use Kraft products, but that is the only mention of the Kraft name. And there are good recipes. It is the only page I have selected to receive all notifications on.

The recognized King of social media is Star Trek veteran George Takei. His Facebook fan page has more than eight million likes and his ratio of promotional stuff to non-promotional is about one in twenty.

EdgeRank encourages good practices by rewarding content oriented materials with a greater reach than purely promotional materials.

I'll be back later today to dig deeper into how Facebook goes about deciding what to deliver and to whom. I will also discuss how we can use that to our advantage.

EdgeRank: Understanding the Algorithm

While it may be discouraging that not everyone "liking" your page doesn't see every post from that page because Facebook doesn't deliver it to their newsfeeds, it actually makes sense given the high volume of messages. Just consider an unfiltered feed like Twitter. The time decay on Twitter is such that most posts are not actually seen by anyone other than those on during the 10-15 minutes after it appears. Even if every post were delivered to a newsfeed as it came in, the actual viewership would be the same or even lower.

However, unlike an unfiltered feed, there are things that the savvy marketer can do to improve the performance of individual posts. This begins with understanding the algorithm. I'm going to try to make this as simple as possible and Please don't be thrown by the "equations" I'm going to use. They are

simple constructs I will use to help explain why one post can get 1000 views and another on the same site get 10.

Why You See What You See in Your Newsfeed

Since 2010, Facebook has organized your newsfeed by posting the "top stories" at the top of your newsfeed even if they were posted many hours ago. You can change this default, by clicking on the newsfeed button and choosing most recent if you want. But even with that, stories coming in about the same time will be filtered so you see more with a certain type of content or from certain people or pages with whom you interact most often.

The basic "equation" is this:

Sigma represents a score given to each "edge" meaning story, comment, like, or other thing posted by an individual or a page. We are most interested in actual posts for our purposes.

U represents affinity between the viewer and the creator of the post. Let me explain this a bit more. Affinity refers to the entire past history, but most significantly recent history, the viewer has with the creator. For instance, posts by friends will generally have higher affinity scores than pages or groups. Friends, pages and groups that one interacts with regularly will score higher than those they don't interact with as often. So, someone on your "friend" list that you rarely, if ever, comment, like or share their posts, may actually score lower than a business page that you frequently engage with. So the nature of the relationship PLUS your history with that person or page helps develop the infinity score.

One thing I encourage my readers to do periodically is to like and share content. I will make a post like this:

"If you love the content we provide, you can help us out. When you see something you like, just click the like button. Even better, leave a comment or share it with your friends. We will appreciate it."

There are some people who click like on almost everything I share. They also seem to receive everything I share on my page.

W stands for weight. All Posts are not created equal. We will talk more in depth about this later in the week. Two general factors contribute to weight – content and type. First, content. Posts that are non-promotional or promotional with added value are given more weight than those that are nothing more than an ad. Posts that have some context do better than those that don't. For instance, posting a link to a page without comment will not perform as well as one that you provide some idea as to why your reader should care. Also, pure "click bait" with very vague descriptions intended to entice people to click on a link without context are not well accepted. Here's an example Facebook execs used to illustrate the point:

Also, be careful when you are reading older articles about optimizing your Facebook page. I have seen click-bait (although not called that) touted as being an effective tool for building engagement and rank. At one time that worked, but about two years ago Facebook began cracking down on it.

Weight also refers to the Type of post. Some things are fairly universal. "Original" content, meaning that which you upload or post directly from your site gets a better score than something shared from another page or even your own personal newsfeed. If you want to share original content on both your personal timeline and your page, then post it originally on your author page and share it with your timeline. That actually counts as a share and it helps the engagement score.

If you see a meme, picture quote, or cartoon you would like to share, click on it to open it in the Facebook lightbox, scroll down, click on options and then download the item. Then upload it as fresh content to your website. Be sure, though, to include a link to the original source in your comment when posting on your site. That way they get some credit and EdgeRank engagement as well.

This can also indicate personal preference. Some of us respond more often to pictures, others to videos, others prefer a simple text post. So, Facebook will deliver more of those with which we engage.

To find out what types of posts your fans prefer, click on the "Insights" link on your Facebook Page and then click on "Posts" and then on "Post Types." You will see the average reach and engagement each receives. Here's a screenshot of my post reactions.

You can see that my photo posts do almost four times better than the second highest post type in terms of reach, but only slightly better in terms of engagement. It does almost 10 times better than original videos. If you notice plain status updates are near the bottom of the list.

Understanding the types of posts which resonate with your unique fan base will help you improve your reach and engagement.

D – This stands for time decay. Most posts are viewed within 180 minutes of being posted. The viewership drops off steeply after that time. We talk about the "Golden Window" for sales on Amazon

being the first 90 days after release when the Amazon search algorithm gives a new book priority placement in the search results. Timeliness is also a factor for Facebook. Something posted within an hour or so of this person coming online is going to get higher ratings than something posted two days before. This is one of the reasons why posting 3-5 times a day and stretching out those posts is a good idea. Also, this is why you should check your insights for information about the times when people are online.

Digging Deeper into the EdgeRank Algorithm

After discussions with Facebook engineers, David Costine in an article published in TechCrunch, introduced this more specific, and in my opinion, more helpful equation:

As Costine notes, these are the high points of the algorithm. Facebook looks at roughly 100,000 factors in determining if a post is shown and where. But mastering these five elements will greatly improve your performance.

Interest

This refers specifically to the interest a reader has displayed in the page creator. There are several factors considered here. This can include whether they are also friends with the page creator, and they subscribe to several of the creator's pages. However, it is weighted heavily on interaction. If the person shares posts, likes them, makes comments, posts to the page, clicks on links, these all indicate readership interest.

Post

This refers to the post's performance among other users. Now, we are getting to something that can help us push beyond our core fan base. If a post is popular among our core fans, evidenced by likes, shares, comments and clicks, Facebook assumes it will be popular with less engaged fans as well. To use an old cliché, "Nothing succeeds like success." If you have good content, it can go viral and you can get a reach that includes friends of fans and friends of friends. For instance, I have 327 likes, but I just put up this post less than an hour ago, and after a couple of shares, my reach is 596 and growing. It already has 23 engagements (likes, shares, comments).

Creator

If you develop a habit of producing posts that get a lot of engagement, then your starting point gets moved up. The starting point is a type of test post. Your item is posted to a certain percentage of fans. This number is variable depending on the type of post, past performance of similar posts, fan loyalty and a bunch of other factors. Then once out "in the wild" if the post does well with that starting audience, Facebook delivers the post to more people.

If you develop a "reputation" with the algorithm for producing posts that people like, they will increase the number of people who get your post right after publication. If it gets a lot of interaction, then the reach will be increased. Remember, the goal of the algorithm is to increase the number of things in a person's newsfeed that they will like and reduce those things they don't like.

Type

We talked about this before. If a certain type of post (status, video, photo, link) is popular with your fans, Facebook will deliver more of that content. This is an easy way to increase your reach. If you see certain types of posts get more coverage, do more of that type. We already mentioned finding out what types of posts in general get the best engagement. However, if you scroll down past the overall numbers, you can see the stats for each of the posts on your page. You can see which got great reach, which ones were clicked on, and which ones had the best overall engagement. In some ways, engagement is more important than generic "reach." It's one thing for someone to see your post in their newsfeed. It is something else for them to engage with the post.

Recency

We already discussed this. Facebook has moved more towards timeliness. They include trending topics in the right margins of their home pages. Those are constantly updated. Here's a quick tip. Check out the trending topics. They have top trends, politics, science, sports and entertainment. If something is trending and you have some content available related to that trending topic, you can probably improve your reach by being timely not only with your reader, but also with trending topics on Facebook.

ASSIGNMENT

I know this is a lot to digest. I'm just going to let you think about these things. If you have a Facebook Author page, look at your insights and see which types of post do best from the overall statistics. Then look at individual posts. Find the one that had the highest reach in the last 60 days. Find the one that had the most engagement (likes, clicks, comments, shares). By Friday, post what you found out through this exercise.

If you do not yet have an author page, check out the video we posted and build your author page and post the URL for it for this week.

In fact, I think it would be great if we all posted the URLs for our Facebook pages. Here's my main one:

http://www.facebook.com/wordmasterbooks