How to Leverage Facebook Edge Rank Rating for Longevity in the News Feed
Social media is currently being touted as the marketplace of the world, and the allure of the captive audience and the low cost of promoting a business there has businesses everywhere hawking their wares on these sites. Facebook currently has the lion’s share of social network users and so a lot of businesses focus their social media marketing on their Facebook brand page. Getting a good return on the time that is invested, however, is more complicated than just logging on and pasting a link to your company’s website.
Most people that have used Facebook will be familiar with the news feed where posts made by your friends are listed for you to scroll through. This page has two settings; the first is most recent posts, and the second is the top posts that come up when you open your Facebook page for the day, which is also the default setting. Obviously a status update that stays in the top posts for longer is going to be seen by more people and so if you are using Facebook for promotions you will want to have your updates rated among these top posts. While most of us know how to use Facebook we aren’t familiar with how it works and make posts in the hopes that they will get enough likes and shares to keep them current. There are some simple strategies that you can adopt to make sure that your status updates get the longest possible lifespan in the newsfeed and they revolve around the algorithm that Facebook uses to rate posts, which is called the Edge Rank rating.
Facebook examines three qualities of every status update to assign it a ranking: affinity, weight and time decay. Understanding what these things are and how they factor into the equation is the key to making long lived posts on the site. The first aspect that is examined is the affinity that the person making the post has with the person reading it. This means that if you have a regular interaction with someone then your posts will have a higher affinity rating and will stay in their news feed for longer. To generate a greater affinity with your followers it is simply a case of taking the time to comment on their posts, like their status updates and generally engage with them. The more often you engage your audience personally the greater your affinity with them will be. It is always better to take the time to add a comment rather than just click the like button because text has more weight than likes.
The second thing that Facebook examines is the weight of the post. The weight refers to the type of content that is used. Facebook ranks video as having the most weight, followed by images and graphics, then links, shares and finally, plain text status updates. This means that to generate longevity for your posts it is best to include a graphic element, or better yet, a video, rather than just a quick comment. Shares and likes show a connection to other users which is why they are better than plain text updates.
The final aspect of a post’s Edge Rank rating is the time decay, which measures how long it has been since the post was made. More recent posts have more favorable time decay ratings and so they stay closer to the top of the news feed. The best strategy is to watch for how long your posts last on the top posts lists and be ready to replace them with new ones that are full of color and interest to tempt your audience to engage with them.