What's Next Marketing

1-2 years ago, it was enough for most businesses to simply be on Facebook. An existence in the space could set an organization apart from its competitors. These days though, there are over 900 million pages, groups, and events that people interact with on a daily basis (SOURCE: Facebook Statistics) and Facebook has become cluttered. So how do you break through and reach your target audience?

Once a user has Like’d your Facebook Page, they rarely return. Jeff Widman of BrandGlue.com discovered that 88% of Facebook users never return to a fan page once they click the Like button. Instead, they watch their Newsfeed for updates from friends, family, brands, and YOU. There are two main options on how a user can view their Newsfeed: Top News and Most Recent.

The “Top News” stream is the default stream when users log into Facebook and 80%+ users never leave this view. News typically stays on this feed for up to 2 days and is supposed to represent a summary of the most important activity within your personal social sphere. Two of your friends are engaged? Facebook thinks you should know this above more trivial information.

But with all the clutter on Facebook, how do you get your organization’s content on your audiences’ Top News? How do you get it shown to the most people for the longest amount of time? Enter Facebook’s EdgeRank. EdgeRank is an algorithm Facebook uses to determine content priority on the Top News feed. A high EdgeRank score will ensure that your content is seen by many more people than your competitors’ content.

EdgeRank is composed of a 3-part formula:

1. Affinity (u): Based on how often the user and the user’s friends interact with content from the Page that is publishing the content.
2. Weight (w): Each type of content is weighted differently for each user based on the type of content and the user’s past interactions.
3. Time (d): The age of the post.

Affinity and Time are fairly simple, but Weight can get fairly complex. If a Facebook user comments and Likes content from your Page, the friends in their network will see more of your content on their Top News feed. Of higher importance though is the type of content you are posting on your Page.

Facebook is very focused on user experience and wants members to engage with a vivid and diverse Top News feed. Therefore, it will prioritize your vivid content above more boring variations. Photos and videos trump internal links, internal links (to a Facebook Page) trump external links (to a website), and external links trump text status updates. Also, new Facebook services get a lot of weight. When Facebook introduced Places, for example, Places Objects received more weight than anything else and trickled way up to the top of everybody’s feeds. The same is happening right now for Facebook’s Questions.

The lowest weight is given to Applications. This was originally intended so that users wouldn’t be inundated by a flood of their friends’ gaming updates (“_____ just collected 8 gold pieces on Farmville”). Facebook also added 3rd Party APIs to the mix.

What are 3rd Party APIs and what do they have to do with EdgeRank? Facebook is quickly becoming the operating system of the Internet. By extending Facebook’s components throughout the web, the social network grows by leaps and bounds. In order to do that, they provided developers with a 3rd Party API – essentially a way for external websites and software to engage and interact with Facebook from a distance. Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, and other self-publishers use the 3rd Party API to provide their members the ability to post to Facebook Pages without going onto the site itself. Those services have even added the ability to schedule content to be auto-published at a later set time.

While very convenient for users, Facebook sees little reason to give this scheduled content a high EdgeRank weight. And why should they? Users aren’t going to the Facebook website, engaging with the infrastructure, or viewing Facebook Advertising. According to our recent research, manually posting content on Facebook, rather than via  a 3rd Party API publisher like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, can increase its viewership as much as 300%!

To combat this problem in the growing social media era of optimization, What’s Next Marketing has developed proprietary software called ContentBooster. Our game-changing ContentBooster software provides our account personnel the ability to schedule and publish client content according to peak audience delivery days/times and not have it post via the 3rd Party API. This ensures that content is viewed by the most people possible. Your organization may have fantastic content, but without proper optimization, few people will see it.

If you have any questions, or would like to learn more about What’s Next Marketing optimization abilities for your organization, call 800-680-5427 or email info@whatsnextmarketing.com today.

Tags: 3rd party API, Affinity, applications, content priority, ContentBooster, EdgeRank, Facebook, Hootsuite, third party API, Time, Tweetdeck, Weight, What's Next Marketing