Many Facebook Pages Are Still Taking Their Fans For Granted

Author: Alex Smith
Published: September 15, 2011 at 2:23 pm

The introduction of EdgeRank, Facebook’s algorithm which acts as a filter for users and decides which content they should and shouldn’t be served in their “Top News” feeds, had a significant impact on the Facebook marketing world when it came into action a number of months ago.

For a great deal of pages, it meant that only around 10-15% of their fans could now be reached through wall posts – with EdgeRank filtering page posts out of the news feeds of a massive proportion of fans who didn’t interact with the page enough to pass the EdgeRank test. To most marketers and the owners or brand pages, this change came unannounced, and many were left frustrated by the apparent drop in engagement and visibility.

Despite this, a number of more determined individuals, be that within an in-house digital PR or social media agency setting, have started to work out various ways of working around EdgeRank, optimizing Facebook posts in order to ensure that, despite EdgeRank, those posts reach the maximum number of Facebook fans as is possible. However, it’s still patently clear that in many cases, brands aren’t taking the time to work out how EdgeRank is effecting their Facebook pages and their audience, or indeed how to combat the algorithm.

The three key factors in EdgeRank are time, affinity and weight. In terms of time, pages should post regularly in order to ensure that there is always a piece of fresh relevant content on their wall – there are no hard and fast rules on this, but the optimum is thought to be around 2-3 per day.

Engagement also plays a big factor – the more engagement a post gets, the more likely other fans are to see it - many pages still post straight forward text-based posts. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with this, research has proven that engagement is significantly enhanced through the use of imagery alongside posts. The same can be said for the use of a call to action at the end of posts – it all goes a long way towards counteracting EdgeRank.