A Little History About EdgeRank.
At a high level, the EdgeRank formula is fairly straightforward. But first, some definitions: every item that shows up in your News Feed is considered an Object. If you have an Object in the News Feed (say, a status update), whenever another user interacts with that Object they’re creating what Facebook calls an Edge, which includes actions like tags and comments.
Each Edge has three components important to Facebook’s algorithm:
- First, there’s an affinity score between the viewing user and the item’s creator — if you send your friend a lot of Facebook messages and check their profile often, then you’ll have a higher affinity score for that user than you would, say, an old acquaintance you haven’t spoken to in years.
- Second, there’s a weight given to each type of Edge. A comment probably has more importance than a Like, for example.
- And finally there’s the most obvious factor — time. The older an Edge is, the less important it becomes.
Strategies to Start A Conversation: Post When Customers are Engaged!
- Posts made between 8 PM and 7 AM receive 20% more user engagement.
- On Wednesdays, fan engagement is 8% above average.
- Posting one to two times per day produces 40% higher user engagement.
- Posting one to four times per week produces 71% higher user engagement.
- Posts with 80 characters or less receive 66% higher engagement. Very concise posts – those between one and 40 characters – generate highest engagement. Only 5% of all retail brand Wall Posts are less than 40 characters in length, even though these receive 86% higher fan engagement.
- Ask questions to spark dialogue – “question” Posts generate Comment rates double that of “non-question” Posts.
- Fill in the blank Posts receive 9 times more Comments than other Posts.
- Offer fans “$ off” and coupons. Posts containing these offer-related keywords receive the highest engagement.
- “$ OFF” offers receive twice the engagement of “% OFF” offers.
- Avoid complicated Wall Posts. Status-only Posts receive 94 % higher than average engagement