How’s Your EdgeRank?

Clients often ask us about frequency of posting to their FaceBook page.

Someone – often a social media “expert” – has told them they need to be careful to not post too often. People will be peeved and unlike them.

It’s a nice theory and we assume that the folks who have advised them are well intended.

But, as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

And so it is with such advice.

It’s wrong. It’s dangerously wrong.

You see, FaceBook uses a complex algorithm called “EdgeRank” to decide what appears in a person’s newsfeed.

Most people are surprised to hear that their posts may be getting to less than 10% of their fans newsfeeds.

In a nutshell, EdgeRank’s algorithm is “affinity times weight times time”.

The key measure is this “affinity” concept. Indeed it is the secret magic behind FaceBook and the most troublesome for corporate FaceBook pages.

In it’s simplest description (and there is nothing simple about it), affinity is about how often and when people interact with your posts.

To complicate things, FaceBook does not see all interactions as equal. It does not even see all post types as equal.

Confused?

So are we. And that is exactly why we spend several hours a week experimenting with EdgeRank to try to understand what is working and what isn’t.

If someone tells you something about FaceBook that can be expressed in one sentence (you should not post too often), run for the hills. They just don’t know what they are talking about. They may have good intentions but they are leading you up the garden path.