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Gaining an Edge With EdgeRankfrom Awareness, Inc | Creators of the Social Marketing Hub

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Gaining an Edge with EdgeRank

Facebook Marketing

Social Media Optimization of Facebook’s EdgeRank Algorithm

For successful Facebook marketing, the simple truth is that brands must dominate the News Feed. All the

fans in the world won’t benefit you if your message isn’t getting in front of your customer’s eyeballs.

The Facebook News Feed isn’t determined at random; Facebook has a secret formula to determine which

pieces of content from which of your friends appears in your personalized feed. That secret formula is

called EdgeRank.

What exactly is EdgeRank? How can marketers use EdgeRank to ensure their content appears in the News

Feed? Let’s examine this critical facet of how Facebook works.

EdgeRank Defined

EdgeRank is an algorithm for organizing content. It looks like this:

The best way to think of EdgeRank is to compare it to another well known algorithm: the Google Algorithm. Most

marketers know that when a user searches in Google, the Google Algorithm scours the internet to return what it thinks

are the most relevant results relative to the search query. EdgeRank is designed to scour the updates of a user’s Facebook

friends and return what it thinks are the most relevant results relative to the user’s interests.

EdgeRank is critical to Facebook’s success. Facebook must ensure that when a user checks their News Feed they are

presented with the updates they will find most relevant and interesting. Without EdgeRank users would have to sift

through content manually, creating a negative user experience.

The above equation uses the following variables:

• Affinity – Interactions a user has with a page, including how often they like items, click on links, view pictures, or

post on a wall. This variable is one sided; if a users often interacts with your content, their affinity score towards you will

go up and the likelihood of your content appearing in their feed will increase. If you click on a user’s profile over and over,

this will NOT increase their affinity score towards you.

• Weight – Different types of content (likes, comments, links, and pictures) have different weight scores and

therefore are more likely to appear in a News Feed.

• Time – Facebook wants to strike a balance between showing recent data without turning into a chronological list

like Twitter.

www.awarenessnetworks.com

Gaining an Edge With EdgeRank


Gaining an Edge

Now that you understand what makes EdgeRank, let’s look at what marketers can do to take advantage of the algorithm. Theserecommendations lean heavily on the excellent EdgeRank study by The Daily Beast:http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/10/18/the-facebook-news-feed-how-it-works-the-10-biggest-secrets.html

Encourage Comments

Facebook gives a higher Weight score to comments over likes. This is likely due to the fact that it takes more of a commitment tocomment on something than the one-click like.

Recommendation: Frame status updates in the form of questions whenever possible. Instead of a status like “We are having asale on room decorations this weekend,” post “Sale on room decorations this weekend: which room are you looking toredecorate?”

Recommendation: Don’t shy away from controversy. Let your opinions on current events and industry news be known, even ifsome of your audience disagrees. If they post a comment on your wall with a contrary view, you’ve succeeded in increasing your EdgeRank score.

Post Video and Pictures

There is a Weight hierarchy by content type. Photos and videos are at the top of the hierarchy and have the highest Weightscore. Facebook wants the site to be as interactive as possible and sees photos and video as being the most interactive postoptions.

Recommendation: Encourage interactions by commenting and posting questions on your own photos or videos. Postinforgraphics and ask if your users are surprised by the data or post a best practice video and ask if your users have additionaltips.

Recommendation: You can test this Weight score using a simpleexercise. Try to get a feel on your average response rate byposting statuses around the same time of day for a few days andmeasuring the number of likes and comments. Then post animage or video at that same time and see if you get aboveaverage likes and comments. If you do, your photo/video likelyappeared in more users’ News Feeds resulting in moreinteractions.

Post Links

Links have a higher Weight score than a simple status, so postlinks. Facebook wants to be the central information destinationon the web, so it likes when users post links even if the usernavigates off Facebook.

Recommendation: Perhaps you work at a company that is acontent creation machine, and you have plenty of new, relevantwebpages posted to your site daily. If so, use these to youradvantage. If not, don’t be afraid to link to articles about yourindustry or anything else your audience might find interesting,even if they are written by a third party. These links won’t resultin sales or leads, but they will increase the likelihood of futurestatuses appearing in your audience’s News Feed as well as build thought leadership, both of which will result in sales/ leads inthe future.

Post Questions

A relatively new Facebook function is Facebook Questions, an easy to use polling interface. Questions can contain pre-definedanswers or users can submit answers depending on the settings you choose. Each time a user votes your Affinity score willincrease.

Recommendation: Status updates that can be framed as multiple-choice questions can instead be delivered via Questions. Testto see how much activity they generate relative to a standard status update.


Utilize Timing

The time variable ensures that posts have a shelf life. Even the most interactive, commented upon post won’t remain in theNews Feed forever. Nor will Facebook allow one company or user to hijack a newsfeed; if you post 10 items in succession youare unlikely to have all 10 items appear in any one News Feed, regardless of the other EdgeRank variables.

Recommendation: Test what time and day of week you get the best response on your posts and post consistently at that time.Most companies see best results by posting once or twice a day only; this allows individual posts to build up enoughinteractions to improve Affinity score.

Get Started

The Daily Beast’s experiment showed a significant result: it is almost impossible for a new user to appear in any News Feed.This is due to one last secret of EdgeRank: interactions between two parties can affect a third party. Remember that unlike theGoogle Algorithm that determines results based on a query, EdgeRank is returning results based on a user. Each piece ofcontent can have a different EdgeRank score per user for a piece of content. It does appear however appear that if a user’sfriends interact with the content, EdgeRank can increase. For example, let’s say your fan page is being followed by Stan. Ignoring other variables, let’s look at two scenarios:

This means generating interactions can get your messages to appear in front of users who would not normally view them.




Turning EdgeRank into Revenue

Most marketers have to justify their company’s social media investment in terms of conversions (sales,leads, form fills, etc.). Some might criticize EdgeRank optimization because it does not generateconversions; leaving a comment on a video post does not bring the user to a purchase page and votingin a poll does not generate a lead. EdgeRank does however contribute directly to conversions.

Conversions can be a goal of social media, but not the product of every single social media activity.Posting links to purchase products repeatedly will all but ensure that your messages do not appear inNews Feeds due to lack of Affinity and Weight. Many social media experts suggest that only 5%-10% ofposts should be intended for conversions. The rest should simply be content your target market findsengaging. Posting engaging content optimized for EdgeRank ensures that when it is time for aconversion generating post, your customers will actually see it.

Many social media skeptics ignore engagement metrics and only analyze conversion metrics such as costper conversion and ROI. Now you know that optimizing for engagement is actually the key toconversions. Ignore EdgeRank and your messages will be trapped in Facebook no-man’s land.


The Awareness Social Marketing Hub

The Awareness Social Marketing Hub helps marketers publish, manage, and measure their marketing

across key social media channels, and helps marketers engage with users around that content. The

Hub has support for the most important social marketing channels in use by enterprises today, including

Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and branded online communities.

The Awareness Social Marketing Hub offers some groundbreaking benefits to enterprises that are

looking to get serious about social media marketing. Benefits include:

• Control your social media publishing with enterprise-grade permissioning,

workflow, and audit controls

• Centralize your social media strategy and execution to coordinate product,

business unit and corporate messages

• Use social media to engage throughout the entire customer life-cycle

• Engage and interact directly with the people who are talking about your social

marketing campaigns

• Measure success across social media channels

For more information see http://www.awarenessnetworks.com/why-the-hub



© 2010 AWARENESS, INC.

Awareness, Inc.

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Burlington, MA 02451

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Contact Information:

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Burlington, ON L7L 5Y7

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Awareness builds social marketing management software for marketers leveraging multiple social

channels to engage with customers, build their brand, and increase revenues. Built upon Awareness’

expertise deploying more than 200 communities and social media projects for the world’s biggest

brands including Sony, JetBlue, Kodak, ASOS.com and AIRMiles, The Awareness Social Marketing Hub

helps marketers publish, manage, and measure their marketing across key social media channels, and

helps marketers engage with users around that content. The Hub has support for the most important

social marketing channels in use by enterprises today, including foursquare, Facebook, Twitter,

YouTube, Flickr, and branded online communities. More information can be found at:

http://www.awarenessnetworks.com


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