Facebook’s EdgeRank is one of the most important algorithms in marketing for jewelers.
Despite this, very few independent jewelers have heard of it and fewer still can claim that they fully understand it.
Before you can understand EdgeRank you first have to have an insight into how much information Facebook has to handle.
Since it was launched in February 2004 the volume of information transmitted on Facebook has skyrocketed to say the very least.
As of May 2012, Facebook has over 900 million active users, stores 100 petabytes of photos and videos (100 petabytes equals 100 million gigabytes which also equals 100 quadrillion bytes of information), people share 360 billion pieces of content each year.
There are around 1 billion individual posts daily, over 694 thousand posts every minute, and just over 11,500 posts every second and it is increasing all the time.
With that amount of information flying around the world obviously Facebook needs a way to sort through what they think you would deem the most important.
The average Facebook user has over 245 friends and 100 other “connections” (pages, events, groups, etc).
With the average amount of articles being produced by each connection per day, for each article that is showing up on your news feed, there are actually 500 – 750 other articles created from your connections.
This is where EdgeRank
comes in to play
Facebook’s EdgeRank performs the same type of function that Google’s PageRank does in that it tries to show the most relevant content to the end-user.
Unlike the secretive Google formula for ranking, Facebook officially revealed its formula factors in April 2010 during their F8 conference in San Francisco.
During that conference Facebook engineers, Ruchi Sanghvi and Ari Steinberg gave the first thorough walkthrough of the underpinnings of Facebook’s News Feed.
From a treetop level, the
EdgeRank formula is
fairly straight forward
Before we get started, let’s walk through some of the 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 that combined together make up the EdgeRank.
These three basic
components are
affinity, weight,
and time decay
The Three Components of Facebook’s EdgeRank
– Affinity Score.
This factor deals with the strength of the relationship between a user and one of their connections such as a friend, page, group, etc.
In plain English, likes, comments, posts, and shares; in addition to, the link clicks, video plays, photo views, and profile browsing, all can affect the affinity ranking.
The more you interact with a post or page, the higher the affinity ranking you have for that page.
The higher the ranking, the more likely that posts from that page will show up in your news feed.
Keep in mind that just because you have a high-affinity ranking for someone’s page, doesn’t mean that they have the same affinity ranking for your page.
You might get all of their posts, while they might get none of yours.
That is why it is critical to keep your fans engaged by providing value, and posting on a regular basis, because even if they read every post you write, if the post isn’t stimulating enough for them to either “Like” or “Comment” on it then it does nothing for the affinity score.
– Weight Score.
The weight score is a measure of the combined value of a post.
The weight is a basic formula that decides that certain pieces of content are more likely to appear in news feeds than others.
The more “likes” you have to your post, the more weight that post has.
A “Comment” on a post adds even more weight to a post than a “Like” because it takes more motivation to actually write a comment vs simply clicking a “Like” button.
As more and more people “Like” or “Comment” on a post the weight just continues to grow for that post and this plays a large role in determining how many of your fans will see it in their news feeds and in which order.
Text-only posts have less weight than a post with a video, photo, or link.
It’s not a coincidence that Coca-Cola has over 13,000 photos on Facebook.
– Time Decay Score.
Put simply, time decay means that something newer is more likely to appear than something older.
Google, here again like Facebook, places a high premium on the freshness of the content.
Newer content and interactions hold more importance and have a higher likelihood of being published in news feeds.
The “decay” of a post forces it down further in the news feeds. It is all about new, and relevant.
While it is important to know the components that go into the post rankings, it is not surprising to find out that the more interaction that clients have with your post or your page, the more frequent your articles will appear in their news feed.
This doesn’t mean that everything you share has to be unique, it just means that the content you do share has to be able to draw the attention of your clients.
Well written, stimulating
content has always
been King
The only difference now is that you have to continually add more relevant content to stay on top.
With over 900 million people on Facebook, it is easy to see the marketing potential it has for your jewelry store.
As you build your jewelry store’s Facebook advertising campaign keep the importance of EdgeRank top of mind.
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The host of “Inside the Jewelry Trade” Radio Show – Jewelry Business Strategist – President of Four Grainer LLC. Author of the business books “A Reason To Chant,” and “A Reason to Chant – Jewelry Trade Edition.” Rod lives in Atlanta with his wife and two almost-human cats.