Businesses use Facebook to build and maintain relationships with their customers, but also to reach new ones. Potential client can discover your product thanks to an interesting story about your product that their friend shared. That’s why it’s important to measure reach of different posts, especially how many non-fans saw the post.
Once you have the data, it is theoretically be easy to optimize your next posts. Just continue doing something like what worked last time and change what didn’t. However, understanding why some posts reach more people than others is more complex.
100 thousand factors
Facebook takes into account how much you interact with the person or a page posting the story, when was it posted, if it’s text or multimedia and how much success has the post had so far. This equation is called EdgeRank and seems pretty straightforward.
However, as Facebook’s officials explained at a special event last week, the algorithm is far more complex than just this one equation. Lars Backstrom, Engineering Manager for News Feed Ranking at Facebook, told Marketing Land that there are as many as 100 thousand individual weights in the model that produces News Feed. The three original EdgeRank elements (Affinity, Weight and Time Decay) are still factors in News Feed ranking, but he says that other things are now equally important.
Since August 6, older stories that were popular get another chance to reach News Feeds with a new mechanism called Story Bumping.
Last Actor update means that Facebook will be much more likely to show stories from the last fifty people a user has interacted with.
New Insights to the rescue
Optimizing for Facebook is thanks to all these updates starting to be nearly as complex as optimizing for Google. The company promises more transparency and regular updates about changes to the algorithm. But are you really going to look at the algorithm when making day to day decisions on what to post and when?
This is why the quietly rolled out new Page Insights were such good news. Not only do they provide much more user friendly presentation of data, they also brought a range of new data that helps to optimize posting. I’d like to highlight the When Your Fans Are Online section on the Posts tab. When you’re dealing with a global community, this can be quite surprising. Despite Story Bumping, Time Decay is still one of the biggest factors in Facebook’s algorithm, and scheduling allows you to compensate for it really easily. Posting at the right time is the single most important thing you can do to make sure your amazing content is seen.
