With millions of users already using it, Facebook has become a major source of traffic for many small businesses. But not every business get hundreds of visitors from Facebook and the reason is very simple, they have a poor edge rank. Edge rank is the algorithm used by Facebook to determine which posts appear in users news feeds. If you have a high edge rank your posts appear more often and more prominently in users feeds which leads to increase traffic. In this article I will briefly explain edge rank and show you how to improve it.
What is Edge Rank ?
To understand edge rank, first you need to understand what is an edge. Edge is any interaction you have with Facebook. Liking a status, uploading a video, liking a photo or even changing relationship status is an edge. So your Facebook news feed is a collection of edges. Edge rank simply decided which edge should appear in your news feed. So if your brand page has a higher edge rank, your posts have a much higher chance of showing up in your followers news feed. There are three factors that determine the edge rank, affinity, edge weight and recency.
Affinity is how friendly you are with some person or brand. For example if you liked a picture uploaded by someone you will usually see more of his updates in your news feed. This is because your affinity with that specific user has increased. Edge weight is the weight given to certain interactions. Not every edge carries the same weight. In general photos and videos carry more weight than a like or a comment. Recency is self explanatory, the more recent your update, more likely it will appear in others news feed.
How to Increase Your Edge Rank ?
So if you want more Facebook traffic then you need to increase your edge rank. And the factor that you can influence the most is affinity. If someone likes, comments or shares one of your posts it directly increases their affinity with your brand. So you should encourage comments and shares whenever you do an update. One of the best ways to encourage comments is by asking question. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about your brand, you can ask a question about an current event or some important global problem. The idea here is to encourage comments and increase your affinity with users.
Another way to increase affinity is by encouraging people to share your content. People are less likely to share your brand announcements, so you should give them something worth sharing. Quotes are some of the most shared things in Facebook so you can share a quote of someone prominent in your niche. Funny quotes also tend to work in almost any niche. All these things combined significantly improves your affinity, which will help in improving your edge rank.
Another thing you can control to a certain extent is edge weight. As mentioned above, photos and videos have a higher weight compared to something like a like or a comment. You can take advantage of this factor by uploading more photos and videos. Creately is a good example of a start-up utilizing edge rank to promote their business. It’s a Visio alternative competing with products like Microsoft Visio, which spend millions on marketing. They didn’t have the budget, but what they had was hundreds of user contributed templates. They simply selected the best ones and started sharing them on Facebook. If you have ever tried to draw diagrams you will know that having professionally designed templates quicken things up considerably. Users loved these templates and started sharing them with their friends which brought in lot of viral traffic to their website. The above image of edge rank can also be found in their public Venn diagram templates section.
Continuity is Key
It is important to remember that continuity is very important if you want to see considerable traffic from Facebook. Sharing things for around 2-3 weeks and then not sharing anything for a while will confuse your users and will have a negative effect on your edge rank. A consistent sharing pattern and constantly engaging with users is the best way to get massive traffic from Facebook. I hope you learned something about edge rank from this article, if you have any questions the comments section awaits :-) .