How EdgeRank Determines Whether People See Your Facebook Posts

When your Facebook friends post messages on their pages, there's a good chance that you may have missed a part of their story, and the same goes for attorney marketing posts you make on your page. Facebook utilizes a system called EdgeRank to determine which subset of messages posted by your friends is actually displayed on your page and vice versa.

 

Facebook's news feed system displays your friends' messages, which are "sorted" through EdgeRank. Described as an "optimization method," it goes through all posts and determines which to display, and it shows only a subset of the whole message.  The reasoning behind this system is that there would be too many messages for you to view at one time if EdgeRank didn't sort them for you.  It seems that Facebook wants to control your experience, and it makes sense if you think about it.

 

A lot of people have hundreds of friends linked to their accounts. If you've been a Facebook user for a number of years, you probably remember how hectic things could get if you didn't log in to your account in a timely manner.  If you wanted to see a post from a particular friend, you were going to be doing a lot of scrolling.

 

There are several elements to EdgeRank calculations:

 

•  Affinity score between viewing user and edge creator. This considers the number of messages you send a friend and how often you visit their page, then assigns an affinity score based on its calculations.
•  Weight for this edge type. The edge type includes things like create, comment, like, tag, etc. Weight is distributed to the various edge types and is basically another method of calculating contribution.
•  Time decay factor based on how long ago the edge was created. This means that newer edge types have priority over old ones. So if you post a new comment, it has precedence over previous ones.

 

There are other factors that EdgeRank considers in calculating which post is displayed in what particular way, but Facebook isn't giving up any more of their secret formula.

 

So what's the lesson?  Just as Google is working hard to provide the most relevant results to its users, Facebook is learning quickly and attempting to enhance their users' experience. With EdgeRank and other changes in store for Facebook, have you been keeping up on your end?  If you'd like to find out more, give us a call for a consultation at 888-886-0939.  Also be sure to download a copy of our book The 5 Biggest Mistakes 99% of Lawyers Make with Their Websites.