Facebook Fan Page
Facebook is the place to be for both marketers and non-marketers these days. Even Facebook creators had no idea it would turn out to be such a huge success where they were able to overtake MySpace. Facebook had made a very wise decision when they decided to use Facebook fan page to monetize the traffic because traffic monetization is a key to their success.
Facebook Fan page is created for users to build a page to attract people with the same interest so that these people with a mutual understanding can have common ground to hang out with. Hence when you have a Facebook fan page, you can actually use it to grow your business. Facebook has employed strict rules (much like Google Search Engine Results) to ensure that your Facebook fan page posts get distributed to the public. The amount of people who sees your fan page are determined by what Facebook Calls the Edgerank (not to be confused with Google’s Page rank) and Graph rank.
What is important to know is that Facebook’s Edge rank is not just bound to the fan page but also to posting of your own profile pages as well Let us look into Edge rank and see how it effects your business.
What is Edgerank?
Most active Facebook fan page users will have tons of Facebook friends. People in Facebook are also allowed to become the fans of a lot of Facebook Pages. Now imagine this, if all your friends and all the Facebook pages that you have followed is posting on Facebook at any given day, your Facebook profile is going to be stuffed with so much activity it might explode. Now the thing is most Facebook users won’t even have the time to View all the posts so Facebook filters only the more popular posts and show it to you. This is done via the Edge Rank.
Most people think that all their posts and announcements on Facebook will be seen by everyone. This is not the case. There have been cases where Facebook users who post wedding announcements on Facebook but was never seen by any of their actual friends.
What actually happens here is that Edge rank has filtered out your posts and was not shown to all your friends and only those who visit your wall can see your post. The thing is Facebook Edgerank will decide what is worthy to be displayed on your newsfeed. What this means is that this is not good for those business owners who are not doing the right things to get on the good side of Facebook’s edge rank.
Facebook Edgerank algorithm is defined by the three basic factor which is your Affinity, your Weight, and the Time Decay Factor. Allow us to explain this in more details. What Facebook ultimately wants is interaction and activity. This is because with all the interaction and activity going on, people will keep coming back for more which ensures that Facebook will stay alive for a very long time.
Affinity simply refers to the relationship, interaction and the activity of any given Facebook user to the creator of the Facebook Post. This means if you and ‘Larry’ have been constantly connecting via Facebook and you have been interacting on each other’s post, your affinity level is very high and Edgerank will place priority to show your post to people who you interact with a lot. Vice versa to the situation mentioned, if you and ‘Harry’ have known each other for long, but rarely connects via Facebook or even visit each other’s profile for a long time, then the affinity ranking here would certainly be low.
Hence if you wish your business posts from your Facebook Fan page to be seen more often, you have to get people (your fans) to connect with you on Facebook regularly. The more activity you have the higher your affinity value would be.
Weight however, is how much people value your posts. Every time you post a video, image or links Edge rank is watching for activity. If your posts gets a lot of click through or if a lot of people are commenting or watching your videos, then the weight of your post is considered to be high. Facebook will think that your post must be interest if there are so many responses to your post each time, hence, never post boring posts. This is to ensure that you get a high weight value for your posts. When that happens, Facebook will show your post to all your friends and start showing them to others as well in a viral manner. This also means that if your post gets a lot of ‘likes’ you your post will be viewed highly as well.
One have to remember that some activity is just more important to Facebook than other acitvities. For example, a Like to Facebook’s Edgerank weighs less than a comment. This is because it is much easier to click on the like button than writing a comment which takes up more time and effort. So if you have a post with 10 comments, it is going to beat a post with 10 likes every single time.
The last factor ‘Time Decay’ would indicate how old the post is. The older your posts are, the more likely it will be dropped out of the news feed so that it will have more chances for newer feeds to appear. However, if your post has a very healthy amount of activity even after a long time since it has been posted, Facebook will still continue to show it virally to those who have never seen your post before. This can help you get a lot of new fans to your page.
With this knowledge, you should adjust your Facebook Marketing strategies accordingly so that you can be sure that every single time you post on your Fan page, your post gets notice by as much fans as possible. That’s where you will get the most traffic and that’s how you can get the most of your constant Facebook postings.
