What is Edgerank? Understanding Facebook’s Newsfeed Algorithm
If you are doing any bits of social media marketing, then you know posting and managing content on Facebook is a large part of it. Most people spend the majority of their time in their newsfeed. How you show up, if you do at all in their feeds, is incredibly important. The algorithm that Facebook uses to determine which content from an individual’s friends and liked-pages is called Edgerank.
The formula for Edgerank is Rank = Σ Affinity x Weight x Decay.
Affinity – Affinity measures the relationship you have with fans on your page. The more a fan like, comment, and share stuff on your page, the more your content will show up in their newsfeed. Facebook also takes into account the last 50 interactions a user has with content. For example, if a fan like a picture you posted up in the afternoon, they’re more likely to see more of your content in the morning. Facebook makes the assumption that the more someone interacts with a piece of content, the more they like it, and continues to show content from the producer on their feeds.
Weight – Facebook gives different weight to the content depending on the type. Video and photos have more weight and often get more engagement too. After that it’s links have more weight, followed by text only updates. Engagement also matters. The more interactions a piece of update gets, the more others will see it.
Decay – The age of your post also plays into effect with Edgerank. The older the post, the less likely it’ll show up on fans’ newsfeed. Relevance of the content to other content that the Facebook user interacted with from other pages and fans also takes into account.
Your Edgerank score and how you show up in your fans’ newsfeed is very relative to each fan. In addition to all of this, your content will never show up in 100% of your fans’ newsfeed. This ensure brands will still use sponsored posts to increase their outreach. Overall Edgerank does a great job in measuring interest. This ensure brands and businesses will place importance on producing quality content, and why marketers still live by the phrase, “content is king”.
Image is from PostRocket’s Infographic on Edgerank.
