My recent days have been filled with Facebook Insights….an exciting life I lead you can see!  The interesting part from my perspective has been to look beyond the fans counts and see what is really happening on pages (see my previous post on this).

The first interesting area has been looking at the correlation between the number of fans, the number of active users and activity on each post (comments/likes).  One thing has come out of these findings is that it is all very well going for fan numbers but this can lead to lower engagement and number of fans actually visiting your page.

Here is a graph taken from a recent study of a page.  There are certain links between the number of fans and weekly active users but once the sponsored stories/adverts have stopped then that number starts to drop off if the content you are producing is not up to scratch.

One thing that I found that revealed more was by looking at the number of fans you have on your page and mark this against the average engagement rate on posts in the same time period.  It showed that the number of comments/likes stayed pretty level (didn’t grow) whilst the number of fans grew, this meant that the rate as a total actually got less over time.  This was because the emphasis was on growing numbers rather than concentrating on the content being produced.

How can you improve your Facebook Page?

Well, the most important thing you need to know about if you are a page admin and/or content creator is the algorithm that Facebook uses to work out which posts are most relevant to each user….. otherwise known as EdgeRank.

 It is becoming the most talked about area when it comes to Facebook at the moment with multiple posts coming out (like the one your reading now) trying to explain what it is and how it affects what you do.

In essence, EdgeRank is used when people keep their wall setting on ‘Top News’, which the majority of people do according to Facebook.  They work out which posts are most suited to you and potentially of most interest by using a formula;

Weight x Affinity x 1/Time Decay

Now, if you want a full explanation of what each means and in depth thoughts then I would point you in the direction of this recent eConsultancy article – The Ultimate Guide to the Facebook EdgeRank Algorithm.

I will attempt to put it a bit more simplistically and explain its importance to anyone who runs a Facebook page, whether it be for a business, charity or club.  The above formula can be split out as follows;

Weight

This is the term given to a certain function/service within Facebook.  It can be video, photo, link or even Facebook Places.  This area is very grey as it is dependent on whatever Facebook is wanted to push at a particular time.  Here is some helpful info from EdgeRank;

Weight is dictated solely by Facebook’s current objectives. For example, their latest objective is to increase interaction via Facebook Places. What we have seen is a huge increase in exposure that are Facebook Places notifications. This same thing happened when video was integrated into the feed differently. From my research (at the time of this writing), FB’s current weight hierarchy is as follows: FB Questions > Video Update > Picture Update > Link Update > Status Update.

Affinity

This is a score given to you in relation to how ‘friendly’ you are with someone.  Basically the more you check someone’s profile the higher up they will appear in your ‘top news’ feeds.  So with brand/club pages, the more someone goes onto your page, comments on posts or likes content then the higher it will appear in their feed.

Time Decay

A simple one here, the older something is then the less likely it is to appear in someone’s feed when they login to their account.  Thus if you only post once a week then you are going to score quite low with that post after a day or so of it going live.

The algorithm works so that at the end of working out the 3 above metrics it will give the post a score which will then decline over time as the time decay kicks in.  If your EdgeRank score is say 27, then it will work out what other posts there are at that time and then put in a ranking with the highest score appearing at the top and the very low (irrelevant) ones not appearing at all.  So if others with scores over 27 yours will come under them in the feed, if there are no others higher than 27 then you come out top….. simple!

This is where ‘time of day’ becomes Important when you are posting.  It is not only about when people are online to see you posts but also when there are less people/brands posting to give your posts the best chance to come out top in peoples feeds and have them interact with it.

I’m currently testing the EdgeRank Checker to see what types of analytics that offers and how it can help page admins like myself for both strategy and content planning.  I’ll let you know how it goes and whether it would be worth your while.  There is a free version on their site so give it a try and see what you think.

This post I hope follows on nicely from my ‘World Without Numbers’ post from Monday.  I’m happy to say it looks like we are moving away from fan counts and delving deeper into the insights to take learnings and more detailed measurements out.

To end, here are some final tips from EdgeRank on how to go about improving your score;

The strategy to improving a Facebook Page’s EdgeRank is different for each Page and should be custom tailored to their audience. However, there are a handful of general best practices to improve your Page’s EdgeRank.

• Post content that naturally engages the audience (thinking exciting, unique, and exclusive)
• Encourage your audience to ‘like’ your content
• Use appropriate images to supplement your text
• Create short and appealing videos to engage your audience
• Update your audience based on when they are on Facebook, not what’s convenient to you
• Content is King – Post truly great content, and engagement along with EdgeRank will increase

After trying out the general recommendations, be sure to keep experimenting and testing what works with your fan base. There is not a magic solution to improving EdgeRank, however with constant evaluation and testing you should be able to always improve it.