Facebook Edgerank: How autoposting may be hurting your rankings
Have you ever wondered why some of your Facebook posts make it to your fans’ news feeds and others do not?
Facebook prioritizes posts using a method they call “EdgeRank.” Similar to Google Pagerank, Facebook’s EdgeRank uses an algorithm that attempts to determine what Facebook users would most like to see in their news feeds. This, in turn, determines how likely your posts will show up in a fan’s feed.
There are three main elements to EdgeRank: Affinity, Weight, and Time as shown in the “formula” provided by Facebook below:
Where Affinity is based on how popular you are with a particular user, Weight is determined mostly by the type of post (video, photos, and links are weighted higher than status updates), and Time decay is simply based on the age of the post.
The Next Web provides a more detailed explanation of the Facebook Edgerank formula.
Though am a huge proponent of streamlining and integrating one’s Social Web presence as much as possible, this formula begs the question: Does auto-posting to your Facebook page hurt your chances of getting onto your fans’ news feeds – since more weight is placed on links than on status updates?
In other words, would you get more engagement from your imported blog posts if you manually posted them as links, than using a third party service or plugin to post them automatically as status updates?
Well, I am not the only one asking this question. Here is an illuminating article by WPMU about how their Facebook traffic increased as a result of discontinuing auto-posting.
This may be something to consider when putting together your next integration plan.
This post originally appeared as a Social Media Tip of the Day on Social Media Power, the blog of SMC Webinar facilitator, Deltina Hay.
Related posts:
- Feeding your blog posts into Facebook
- No Facebook Profile? No Problem.
- How to control your Facebook thumbnail images
- Video: Adding a Facebook Like Box to Your Blog or Website
- Twitter Versus Facebook For Elite Companies
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