The Facebook news feed is important to all of us – for businesses, personal profiles, and groups. In fact, one could argue the most prime piece of real estate on Facebook is the Top News feed.
At the F8 Developer Conference, Facebook engineers Ruchi Sanghvi and Ari Steinberg shared enough to intrigue our community to analyze the EdgeRank algorithm and give resources on how to fall in line, get your EdgeRank, and sit on the top of everyone’s news feed.
EdgeRank Factors & How They Apply to You
There are three major Facebook EdgeRank ranking factors:
- Affinity: This is directly related to likes, interactions, and your relationships. Those you interact with regularly receive a higher affinity score. If you were to like the Search Engine Watch Facebook page updates regularly, we would receive a higher affinity score from you. Affinity score is a one-way street. You can’t increase your own score by actively liking other user’s updates. When asked about the click-through rate of links counting toward your EdgeRank score, Facebook staff hinted CTR isn’t measured now, and that those metrics could be included in your external likes as well as your link-share within the Facebook domain.
- Weight: Think of actions that take more effort here. Clicking “Like” would be at one end of the spectrum, far at the other end is comments on video or photos.
- Relevancy or timeliness: This is the freshness factor. Recent content receiving immediate activity with deep interactions would be ideal.
As far as we know, Facebook has not revealed their scoring system (eg. Toolbar PageRank’s 0-10 scale).
What Does EdgeRank Mean for the Future?
If you’re buying fans or corralling fans who don’t really care about you brand, the numbers of fans with little interaction can actually hurt you. A page with many fans and little to no interactions would receive the lowest EdgeRank score and it would be difficult to get page status updates featured anywhere.
As with Google, Facebook wants to feature reputable sources in the Top News feed, so the goal is showing Facebook you possess that authority in your vertical.
How to Get on the Top News Feed?
What does it take to get featured on the feed regularly, and what you can you do to grow your authority and EdgeRank? Here are 10 ideas:
- Use photos and videos often.
- Encourage interaction without being pushy.
- Ask questions your fans and friends can’t help but answer.
- Create a poll.
- Open Graph web site and widgets – after all, not all interactions happen on the Facebook domain.
- Promote your Facebook offline. Promotions can drive interest, contests, and also resources. Offline friends can make the world of difference.
- View Facebook Analytics and gauge your audience.
- Post trivia, quizzes, and games (not requests!)
- Keep dialogue alive longer.
- Include links and images within updates.
EdgeRank is Everywhere
Facebook’s EdgeRank isn’t something attached only to your status update. It’s also your page, your profile, and incorporated with everything you do at Facebook.
Novelty EdgeRank checkers have already popped up on the web. Many other sources have giving tips towards optimizing your EdgeRank score. While it doesn’t necessarily change your strategy, it gives us relevant factors to keep in mind as we manage and maintain our Facebook properties.