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Ever wonder why certain people and organizations always seem to get the love in your Facebook timeline, and others barely show up at all? Facebook employs a complex algorithm that creates your "Edge Rank," which determines how important it think your posts are. (This holds true for personal profiles and fan pages.)
Facebook won't exactly tell you, "Here's how our algorithm works," so The Daily Beast undertook a huge study to reverse engineer Facebook's Edge Rank. They found a lot of ways to manipulate the ranking system to your advantage. One of the easiest is to pay attention to the type of content you're posting, and post stuff Facebook has a crush on. Here's the order in which Facebook ranks content:
- Videos/Photos. You already knew that multimedia is engaging. Well it turns out Facebook is totally crushing on multimedia, too. Posting photos and videos increases the odds that your content is shown to your followers.
- Links. Not quite as good as multimedia, but Facebook does <3 links (not as boyfriend/girlfriend, but as really good friends).
- Status updates. Facebook is totally not into your status update. If Facebook was giving out Valentines to the whole class, it wouldn't even sign the card it gave your status update.
So what does this mean? It's simple: if you want a good rank (which means Facebook will show your content to your fans/friends more often and longer), focus on the types of content Facebook is a little in love with. Instead of posting just a status update, find a photo, video, or link to go along with it. Facebook will definitely choo-choo-choose to show your content more if you do.
Got questions about how to make Facebook <3 your page/profile? Ask them in the comments!
Evan Sutton is Communications Manager at NOI, and a hopeless nerd
Image adapted from Brian Sawyer, via Creative Commons
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