The Problem with Facebook Edgerank

The sheer amount of information crossing your Facebook news feed is staggering. A never-ending cascade of thoughts, links, videos and photos of cats, unless you have less than 100 friends it is impossible to keep up with all the data streaming before your eyes.

Facebook realized that they had to find a way to pull the most relevant data to the forefront. After all, if your stream contained every post from every friend and every page you followed, you would most certainly drown in a sea of likes, comments and witty saying.

The method they implemented is called Edgerank, and for many it is a less-than-optimal approach to the overwhelming stream of information appearing on our feeds.

So what exactly is the problem with Edgerank and why should you care?

First of all, I\’m not going to go into depth on how Edgerank works, other than to say it is an algorithm that determines which of your posts appear on other\’s news feeds and how high up on the page they appear.

For an in-depth analysis of Edgerank, I recommend this resource.

I am more concerned with the practical application of Edgerank, and I want to conduct a little experiment to see what influence you can have on how this functions.

For a case study, I\’d like to use my own fan page. If you aren\’t a fan, I invite you to click the link and LIKE my page. That will help make for more conclusive data in my experiment.

As you can see from a recent screenshot, I have over 14,000 likes to my page.

However, the majority of people who like my page will never see the majority of my posts. And guess what? The same goes for you. Your fans are no longer YOUR fans. Truth is, they never really were.

As you can see from the following examples, my posts where I ask a question seem to get the most views on Facebook. Insights from the first post show that 2279 people saw my post.

3066 saw this simple post where I asked my fans what their favorite word to say is.

It is interesting to see how many organically saw the post versus those who saw the post as a result of another person\’s sharing it.

But what I\’ve discovered is those numbers are about as high as they get.

Posts which include videos or outbound links get displayed far less frequently.

Why is that?

Because Facebook doesn\’t want you to leave their site. Posts with links to other pages get less exposure. It\’s that simple.

What is Facebook\’s answer to exposing your post to more of the people who actually requested to see your post in the first place?

They want you to pay for that exposure. Welcome to Promoted Posts.

When you click PROMOTE at the bottom of your post, you will be presented with options to spend your money to reach your fans.

It\’s not rocket science and I completely understand why Facebook is doing this. They have billions of page views due to a massive member base and they have no real organic monetization in place. That\’s why you now see options to purchase a gift for a friend when you wish them a happy birthday. That\’s why advertisements are taking up space on the right sidebar. And that\’s why they want you to pay to reach people who you used to be able to reach for free.

With that said, I would like to invite you to help me with an experiment. I am going to link to a post on my fan page. It is going to be a post promoting this very entry on my blog.

I\’ve already got a strike against me because my post will be linking off Facebook. Normally, I would expect to see somewhere between 750 and 1500 views on a link to one of my blog entries.

Here\’s what I want you to do…

When you get to the entry, please LIKE it, COMMENT on it and SHARE it on your newsfeed. It doesn\’t matter what you write. Just write something.

The goal is to create as much activity on the post as possible.

I will then let you know the results of the post on an ongoing basis. I am the only one who will see the insights, but I will share the numbers with you as we go.

I think it will be interesting to see how views correlate with likes, comments and shares.

So, are you on board? Excellent! Let the experiment begin.

Simply click here to visit the post. Like, Comment and Share it to get things started.

Stay tuned for results, and I invite you to comment or ask questions here on my blog as well.