Edgerank is the Facebook algorithm that determines which stories appear in each user’s news-feed. Regardless of how many fans a page has, research indicates that pages on average only reach about 17% of their Facebook fans, e.g. A page with 20K fans will reach 3,400 fans.
In this post, I’ll explain how EdgeRank works, how to create a more effective Facebook posting strategy, which updates work best, how to reach more fans and ultimately – how to optimise Facebook’s marketing potential for your business and brand.
How is Facebook’s EdgeRank calculated?
The three factors that affect the Edgerank algorithm are:
- Affinity
- Edge Weight
- And Time Decay
What is Affinity?
Affinity is based on closeness on Facebook. How “friendly” you are and how much you “interact”?
- Liking, viewing, commenting and sharing send a proactive signal of closeness
- Activities that require higher levels of user engagement get a higher score. Leaving a comment takes more effort than clicking the “Like” button.
- The more you interact with a person or a page, the higher their affinity score
- But affinity only works one way: you can’t increase your affinity score in another user’s feed by constantly clicking on their “Like” buttons.
What is Edge Weight?
Edge Weight determines which types of content are more important. The three types of content which are understood to have the highest weighting are:
- Videos,
- Photos,
- and Links
Each person’s Edge Weight is different on Facebook, i.e. someone who likes photographs is more likely to have them in their feed than someone who doesn’t.
What is Time Decay?
The final factor that determines EdgeRank is recency also known as time decay.
The older an update, the less likely it is to appear.
Related: The Strange World of Gathering Facebook Fans: 5 Ways To Make It Right!
How to create a Great Facebook Posting Strategy?
Understand Edgerank and you will see that it creates:
An “engagement” challenge and opportunity – for managers of Facebook pages.
- Businesses want to promote their products and get more customers. What’s the point of being on there unless you are getting an ROI?
- Success on Facebook depends on driving engagement, i.e. reaching more people means getting more likes, more comments, more shares and more fans.
- Promotion and engagement don’t often easily go together. It is difficult for most businesses to create updates that are both engaging and promote – at the same time!
What should your Facebook Posting Strategy look like?
Create a posting strategy that includes 2 types of Facebook Status Updates but one that is weighted in favour of engagement.
- The correct ratio will be different from business to business but a good place to start is either 3:1 or 2:1
- Edge weight means that where possible, all updates should include video, picture and/or links.
- Plan to post regularly – time decay requires that an effective posting strategy is also a consistent one.
What is an engagement update? 
As outlined, engagement updates will make up the majority of your posts, – the objective here to get:
- Comments,
- Likes,
- Shares
- And/or fans.
Related: 20 Easy Ways To Grow Your Company Facebook Page And Fans
The following is a great infographic from Postplanner.com highlighting status ideas to drive engagement and improve edgerank:
To summarise:
An effective Facebook posting strategy will be one where you:
- Post consistently
- Include videos, photos and links in your upadtes
- Where the majority of posts seek engagement with fans
- And minority of posts seek to promote the business
Related: In-Depth Small Business Facebook Case Study And Strategy: Mykidstime
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