Facebook Marketing

Gaining an Edge with EdgeRank

Gaining an Edge With EdgeRank from Awareness, Inc | Creators of the Social Marketing Hub @awarenessinc | awarenessnetworks.com Gaining an Edge With EdgeRank

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.

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Gaining an Edge

Now that you understand what makes EdgeRank, let’s look at what marketers can do to take advantage of the algorithm. These recommendations 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 to comment 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 a sale on room decorations this weekend,” post “Sale on room decorations this weekend: which room are you looking to redecorate?”

Recommendation: Don’t shy away from controversy. Let your opinions on current events and industry news be known, even if some 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 Weight score. Facebook wants the site to be as interactive as possible and sees photos and video as being the most interactive post options.

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

Recommendation: You can test this Weight score using a simple exercise. Try to get a feel on your average response rate by posting statuses around the same time of day for a few days and measuring the number of likes and comments. Then post an image or video at that same time and see if you get above average likes and comments. If you do, your photo/video likely appeared in more users’ News Feeds resulting in more interactions.

Post Links Links have a higher Weight score than a simple status, so post links. Facebook wants to be the central information destination on the web, so it likes when users post links even if the user navigates off Facebook.

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

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

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

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Utilize Timing The time variable ensures that posts have a shelf life. Even the most interactive, commented upon post won’t remain in the News Feed forever. Nor will Facebook allow one company or user to hijack a newsfeed; if you post 10 items in succession you are 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 enough interactions 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 the Google Algorithm that determines results based on a query, EdgeRank is returning results based on a user. Each piece of content can have a different EdgeRank score per user for a piece of content. It does appear however appear that if a user’s friends 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.

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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 generate conversions; leaving a comment on a video post does not bring the user to a purchase page and voting in 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 in News Feeds due to lack of Affinity and Weight. Many social media experts suggest that only 5%-10% of posts should be intended for conversions. The rest should simply be content your target market finds engaging. Posting engaging content optimized for EdgeRank ensures that when it is time for a conversion generating post, your customers will actually see it.

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

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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

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Contact Information:

Awareness, Inc. About Awareness 25 Corporate Drive, Suite 390 Burlington, MA 02451 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’ United States expertise deploying more than 200 communities and social media projects for the world’s biggest Tel: 1 781-270-240 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 Awareness Canada social marketing channels in use by enterprises today, including foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and branded online communities. More information can be found at: 5050 South Service Road, Suite 100 http://www.awarenessnetworks.com Burlington, ON L7L 5Y7 Canada Tel: 1 866 487 5623 © 2010 AWARENESS, INC. Fax: 1 905 632 4922