This past year Facebook came up with what they call EdgeRank. According to Hubspot, Edge Rank is an algorithm that determines what shows up in any given Facebook user's news feed. There are three components that the algorithm uses as a guide: affinity, weight and time decay.
Affinity is when you have engagement with other Facebook users. The more you can get people to interact with your page, the better off you will be and the more likely your posts will show up in their news feed.
Weight depends on the type of content you are posting. The more that post is receiving comments, being shared and liked, the more weight it gives you. I love posting questions, promoting a post, or write about a hot topic to increase the weight my posts are getting. You can check your insights to see what posts are going viral and keep posting content like it.
Time Decay refers to how often you post and the timeliness of the content. Just like the news, the older it becomes, the less important it is and less likely to appear in news feeds.
The lower your EdgeRank is, the less engaged your brand will get out into the news feed and the less engagement you have. Only 17% of a page actually show up in fan's news feed.
I know, it sounds depressing, doesn't it? When they went to EdgeRank, I was thinking to myself, what am I going to do to get people to notice me? I knew I had to create great content and figure out ways to get people to notice it.
Here are some tips that can help you get your business seen by your fans.
I have heard people say, keep your business page separate from your personal page. You have to remember that Facebook is a social environment and people do like to hear some stories about you or your business.
You have to decide how personal you want to get on your business page. I think it depends on what type of business you have. Even if it is a business to business, I think you can still squeeze in a little personal content. It makes you human and people will connect to you more. When my daughter got engaged, I posted that on my business page. I got many congratulations which is engagement for my page.
When I add pictures to my post, I get a lot of likes and shares. I don't always get the engagement from the content that I wrote but am still happy with all of the shares and likes. The more engaged your page is, the more people are talking about you and the better your rating will be.
Photo albums, pictures and videos increase engagement by 180%, 120% and 100% respectfully. This is so much higher than just posts with content. With pictures people can add comments and write captions that increase engagement 5.5 times more than a regular post.
According to Hubspot, digital doodles, such as a smiley face, can increase likes by 57%, comments by 33 % and shares by 33% over posts. I thought this was rather interesting, who would of thought? Using pictures and emotican catches the reader's eye. Even though you are using visual aids, make sure you are still sharing compelling content to keep them on your page and reading.
If you are posting about a product or service, have images that relate to them and drive your readers to custom landing pages or to your website.
This ends the first part of this article. Make sure you stay tuned tomorrow for the second half of how to increase your Edge Rank.
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To your Success,
Anita Levesque
http://facebook.com/anitawaltonlevesque
207-694-0314
