Facebook Marketing Success: EdgeRank and Fan Visibility
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If you’re new to Facebook marketing, you may think you just need to get some fans and that every time you post on your page, they’ll all see it. You may think your fans will go back to your Facebook page often. You may also think they see other fans’ posts on your page.
Actually, most of these assumptions are wrong.
When someone likes your page and becomes a fan, you really only get the opportunity to keep him interested. If they don’t like or comment on your page’s posts, they will stop seeing them. In other words, if you’re boring, you lose your audience.
Why does this happen?
First, most people spend most of their Facebook time on their home page, and rarely go back to the Facebook pages they’ve liked. They see posts from their friends and pages via their home page’s news feed. But as Facebook users, we don’t see everything, because there’s too much content out there.
The average user creates a new piece of content every day. If you have the 130 friends that the average Facebook user has, that’s 130 posts, photos, videos, and blog posts from your friends that you’d have to consume every day. The average user is also connected to 80 community pages, groups, and events. That means about 200 entities you could hear from each and every day! It’s too much.
Facebook filters that tsunami of content for you with an algorithm called EdgeRank.
What Is EdgeRank and How Does It Work?
EdgeRank is the filter that determines what content each user sees on Facebook. It’s actually rather complicated; Facebook keeps track of how often you interact with friends and pages’ content, and which types of content you like. For example, you may interact a lot with your buddy Brad’s photos but not so much with his text-only status updates.
The same goes for pages; you might interact with the Coca Cola page’s status updates, a little bit with the videos they post, but not at all with their photos. What you interact with determines what you’ll see in the future. That means that, in your news feed, you’re going to see a lot of Brad’s photos and Coca Cola’s status updates, and some of Coca Cola’s videos.