Facebook EdgeRank: Start by Clicking Reply

By: Galen Sanford

How EdgeRank Bucked the Brands
In December 2013, the Facebook community blew a gasket. Facebook changed EdgeRank and Organic Reach plummeted. Fans didn’t see as much content from Pages, so brands felt they had to pay to promote posts. Many pundits claimed Facebook was conspiring to sell more ads. *GASP*

But the protest missed the point. Facebook didn’t arbitrarily cap EdgeRank. They merely nuanced the algorithm. Certain brand content, which previously passed through the gauntlet of 100,000ish factors – including competing with fans’ friends – didn’t survive anymore. Brands needed to improve their Facebook strategies.

How Most Brands Weren’t Even On the Horse
While most mechanisms of EdgeRank are beyond brands’ control, the irony of the outrage was (and still is) that most brands weren’t taking advantage of levers they could pull and so pre-outrage EdgeRank was already dismally low.

EdgeRank’s biggest and most powerful lever is also its most obvious. To improve Organic Reach, brands need to interact with their fans. It’s their only way of telling EdgeRank they’re valuable enough to rank above content from fan’s friends. Facebook calls their score of fan/brand interactions “Affinity”, and brands have a different score with every fan.

How Brands Can Get Back in the Saddle
Nothing boosts Organic Reach like improving Affinity. You can feel this in your own feed. People you interact with frequently appear more often than those you don’t. It makes sense – we wouldn’t want baby photos from a high school acquaintance to take precedence over a close friend’s announcement (actually, some of us wouldn’t want baby photos to take precedence over anything…).

The same goes for brands. As long as brands are those distant high school acquaintances, their content isn’t going to displace a fan’s friends. It would annoy Facebook’s key commodity: users’ attention. But if a brand is friendly with a user, Facebook figures that user might want to see content from that brand (even better if it’s well-received, recent content). At Crowdly, we look at a lot of interaction data, and we’ve seen fans a brand interacts with are 4.25x more likely to re-engage than the average fan. Each fan like, comment, or other engagement boosts that Affinity score.

How Brands Can Convert Page Likes to Brand Love
One tactical response to reduced Organic Reach is clear. Brands need to start conversations in the comments, conversations fans will actually respond to, ones that make them feel human, ones that make them feel you’re human – and fans will respond. They’ll tell their friends. Who will tell their friends.

Brands’ Organic Reach rises and falls with their Fan/Brand Affinity. When brands are friendly with fans, their best content will deserve a spot at the top of feeds. At which point, brands attain marketing nirvana: they reduce their ad spend and fans speak fondly of them. Which is the point of social media community management: converting the public into fans, fans into customers, and customers into advocates.

Want to learn more about building your brand content’s EdgeRank on Facebook?