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If you’re an avid user of Facebook you’ve probably wondered how they seem to always know what you want to read. Why do your friend’s comments appear on your wall when your comments are lost got me thinking. How exactly does Facebook decide what posts will show up where? And how can we as internet marketers get our posts to show up in the feeds of all our fans?

Last year at the F8 developer conference Facebook finally explained its “Facebook Algorithm” in depth, centering the discussion on what they call “Edgerank.” According to the developers, the system is not unlike Google’s system for ranking search results, dictating what content will appear at the top of each user’s news feed based on a sliding scale of relevance. Broken down, every piece of content is an object and every interaction with said content is an “edge;” hence the idiom “Edgerank.”

The process may sound complicated but it’s actually quite logical. Facebook simply allows content with more interaction behind it to be ranked with more weight. For example, the more “likes” a post gets, the more people who interact with it, and the more private interaction that results from it, the more it is weighed and the better chance it has to show up on user’s pages.

The system is also weighted between likes, emails, posts, pictures, etc; each having more weight than the other depending on how much “effort” each individual action requires.

Lastly, timeliness is considered. Today’s comment about your dog will hold much more relevancy than last week’s comment about your cat, so staying on top of the game is an integral part of being seen.
So how can our content be seen with as little wasted time and expended effort as possible?

The key is to encourage your readership to interact with your posts by making them compelling. For example, rather than saying a close ended statement like: “working for yourself is the only way to go,” you can say: “Why is it that I hate working for others and all I want to do is be my own boss?” Comments like these will likely get a larger reaction from your fans, and Facebook will reward the interaction by exposing it to a larger audience base.

The next step is to supplement your efforts by liking comments, commenting on pictures, sending emails, and just being overall interactive with your fans. You should jump onto other people’s pages, post interesting statements, and nurture conversations once they get started.

Lastly, be sure to space out your posts in even intervals throughout the day. Interspersing your efforts in small increments will be exponentially more powerful than one big dump of content. Facebook will notice your “consistency” and reward you for it by exposing your content to more viewers.

In the end, you’re going to have to do a little leg work to get noticed on Facebook. But by using this premeditated approach advertising on Facebook can yield major profits from a small investment of your time.

Tags: Edgerank, Facebook Algorithm, Facebook Marketing, Social Media Marketing