There are a lot of discussions out there about what Facebook has changed lately and how it is affecting the posts’ reach. Business owners are mad and marketers are working like crazy to figure out how to reach their audience. The truth, however, lays in something quite simple: the Facebook EdgeRank.
The EdgeRank is Facebook’s code that determines what will be seen in a fans’ newsfeed.
The code measures 3 variables before deciding who sees what: affinity, weight and time decay.
Affinity measures how often a fan has interacted with a person or page. If I like, comment and/or share my friend Mary’s posts a lot, Facebook will understand that I like her content and will make sure her content is always on my newsfeed. The same happens with pages. If I engage with a page often, Facebook will understand that I find that page’s content desirable and the platform will make sure I get that content on my newsfeed.
But that’s not all EdgeRank takes into consideration.
The algorithm also weighs how many likes, comments or shares a post gets. The weight is how popular a post is. Popular posts will show up in my news feed even if my affinity with the page hasn’t been high. In other words, even if I don’t engage much with a page, very popular posts will be shown to me (because it is probably interesting if so many people interacted with it).
The third thing EdgeRank measures is time decay. The time decay is how long ago the content was posted (or how old the post is). Facebook will show newer posts first, but an older post can be shown as well if it has more affinity or more weight.
In other words, the best way to get your content in front of most of your customers is by posting interesting content. Interesting content will get fans to interact, which will not only increase the weight of the post (popularity) but it will also increase the affinity between your page and the fan. While timing is definitely important, if your posts are nice and your fans interact with them, they’ll reach more people, no matter when you posted.
For more in depth information on how the EdgeRank works, check out The State of Facebook: What’s Working Now
