What is Facebook EdgeRank – Facebook for Business 101

The Facebook EdgeRank Algorithm

Many Facebook page managers ask me “Why aren’t more people seeing my posts?”.

It’s true, if someone has x-number of Facebook fans, generally only a fraction of those fans will ever see your posts.

But why?

Research reveals that only 16% of your fans will see you posts on average, and that is due to an algorithm created by Facebook that most people have never heard of.

Facebook has a control mechanism that limits how many of your page’s updates are seen by your fans and followers, and that mechanism is Facebook EdgeRank.

What is Facebook EdgeRank?

EdgeRank is the algorithm that determines what items populate your and your followers’ Facebook news feed. With all the friends people have and pages they like, most users would be overwhelmed to see all of the activity generated by these connections. Facebook, therefore, assigns a value to every possible story that could end up in the feed.

EdgeRank is based on the sum of:

1. Affinity – Measures the relationship between the viewing user and the creator of the story. The closer the relationship the higher the score
2. Weight – Classifies the post by its type, for instance, whether it is a photo upload or a comment on another person’s status
3. Time – How recent was the post made

What is Facebook EdgeRank? In layman’s terms?

Facebook EdgeRank is an algorithm that decides what are the most important posts to display in someone’s news feed. If Facebook EdgeRank decides that a post is not important, then it gets dropped off the feed, or never get’s shown at all.

1. Affinity – This score means the more that when a Facebook user “interacts” with your page and its posts (i.e. going to the page itself, liking posts, commenting on them, and sharing them with their friends), your affinity score with that user goes up; the higher the score, the better
2. Weight – Facebook gives higher weight scores to posts that include photos and videos than posts with links or just text; again, the higher the score, the better
3. Time – This refers to how recent the post is; the older your post is, the less likely it becomes to appear on a Facebook user’s news feed. Newer posts have a higher Time score; once again, the higher the score, the better.

What is Facebook EdgeRank? In visual terms?

For all you visual learners out there, here is an infographic that breaks it down for you:

-Lance Brown